To the Stars

by Nathan Dodge

  Book Description

  An Anthology

  Dragon-like creatures live peacefully together with their delicate, furred symbionts. A freighter pilot and his ship have an unlikely romance. A runner questions the humanity of the athletes he watches at the track. Civilizations come face to face, yet fail to recognize one another. And finally, man reaches for the edge of the universe—and touches the other side.

  “To the Stars.” It’s been the goal of scientists, writers, and dreamers for centuries, and now humanity stands at the cusp of making interstellar space travel a reality. In this Dodge/Dodge science fiction anthology, different possibilities are explored, from those just beyond tomorrow to the wildly distant future. While some explorations yield only a lonely universe, other times they lead to the discovery of a crowded cosmos. And with each encounter, they dig further into the nature of humanity, the discovery of alien life, and the exquisite lure of the unknown.

  TO THE STARS

  Copyright © 2018 Nathan Dodge and Sharon Dodge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Published by

  Nathan and Sharon Dodge

  Contents

  Book Description

  Title Page

  To the Stars

  Intelligence

  Still Life

  Base Pair

  And With the Earth Have Done

  Runners

  Her Teeth, That Rend Like Kisses

  Last Chance for Lost Cause

  At the Edge of the Universe

  About the Authors

  To the Stars

  Sharon

  Death.

  Death everywhere:

  My friends held like welcome banners to bullets

  Him pushing me ahead to the front lines

  Him being shot by his best friend for his bullets

  Being held under the bodies

  Crushing skulls so I could—

  * * *

  I wasn’t on a battlefield.

  I lay on a bed inside a house. Or I thought I did. I was blind, mostly. Far back, so dimly it was almost beyond recall, I remembered my implants, many tedious fine-tunings of my artificial optic nerves as a small child, before the takeaway from my family, before I never saw home again. It was malfunctioning, I supposed. Everything was a blur around me, in one eye only: light and dark, an impression of a door, a would-be bed, a sketch of a kitchen. I was slightly nauseated. I had the feeling I should call for my daughter, only I couldn’t remember her: or I did, but a scattering of images. Mareka at two, Mareka at ten, Mareka at the park telling me about a boy, a watercolor painting of a life in passing. But no idea where she was, how to call her.

  No idea who I was.

  A knock at the door interrupted my perambulation. I stood, pushing off the blankets, and shuffled toward it.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” I blinked. “How do you not know?” I meant it literally: how did both of us not know?

  “Because I don’t—oh, for fuck’s sake, just let me in.”

  I should have been alarmed, but I felt a weight lifting from my chest at the woman’s voice, and I opened the door.

  I had an impression of white hair, a strong, tall body against the sunlight. Familiarity.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked. Do you remember bullets? I wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  “No,” she said.

  “I think I know you. You seem familiar, anyhow. Come on in and sit.”

  The woman laughed and barged in, moving past me back toward the kitchen. I was half-tempted to throw my hand on her shoulder to lead me, but instead I continued my shuffle and joined her at the table.

  “You blind?”

  “I’ve got some visibility in one eye,” I said. My voice was calm: I was good at that, I remembered. “Where are we? Some kind of neighborhood?” Outside it had been green.

  “No. That’s the craziest part. You can’t see it, I guess, but it’s all imitation-neighborhood. The blue sky ceiling is painted on. There are some potted trees and grassy sections and even a few animals—songbirds, a squirrel—but it’s for show. Can you remember anything before today?”

  “There’s food in the fridge.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “No,” I said, hands waving in front of me as if to erase the words and start over. “I mean, I remember there’s food in the fridge. I remember … I remember flowers. Tulips. I remember where the bathroom is.”

  “So you know this place.”

  “Like I’ve been here a bit, only … I feel I’ve just woken up. If I had thought about it for very long, I think I would have decided I’d gone crazy. Or maybe just gotten old.” I tried to read my hands for their age, but my vision was too unclear for them to inform me of anything further. My hands smoothed themselves over one another, one, two: dry, but not ancient. But also not so young. Not a shield on a battlefield.

  “You’re young,” the woman said cheerfully. “Not as old as me. And I’m not that old.”

  “I’ve got a grown daughter. I think.”

  “You started early, then.”

  Memories flickered: I made no comment.

  Instead, I shuffled to the fridge and pulled out a few things. I expected the woman to tell me she wasn’t hungry again, but she was quiet, and I found kitchen towels and started wrapping up a few things—crackers, sandwiches, a unit of milk. When I finished, I turned to the woman.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got shoes somewhere. Help me find them.”

  * * *

  We kept expecting someone to stop us, but the neighborhood, or whatever it was, was void of life both human and animal, just a few task-specific bots wandering the place. The pale imitation of an Earthly neighborhood left my skin crawling, even as its familiarity troubled me: like a book you’ve owned for years that you’d almost forgotten about, until one day your eyes stop on it as you pore through your shelf. Alien; familiar. My right eye seemed to be working a little better at least, enough to where I could stumble along a little faster. Still, I trailed carefully after the white-haired woman, hands outstretched just enough to warn me of any impending stupidity on my part. Which was why I found the button.

  The shrubs next to us were another set of plasticine constructs, and my fingers were tickling their tips when I felt the wall.

  “I found something,” I said. The woman turned abruptly, body language first inquiring, then dismissive as I tapped the wall to her attention.

  “Just a wall. We’re skirting the edges of the compound,” she added, but then my fingers ran over a smooth protuberance, familiar to the touch. Without thinking, I pressed it twice, then slid it up and to the left. The wall slid open.

  “Guess I do remember something,” I said as I stepped toward the door, pleased. In a lightning-fast move the woman snapped in front of me, arm blocking my further ingress. Her head flipped first to one side, then the next, before she relaxed and pulled back.

  “Safe,” was all she said.

  “Thanks,” I managed finally. “Guess it was stupid considering I can’t see.”

  “Someone’s got to look out for you,” she said. I nodded and tagged after her, the comfort of her proximity not lost on me. I felt an urge to lea
n in to her, to crawl into the safety of her.

  I ignored it.

  We paused in the hallway, suddenly at a loss. The halls were eerily dark. “Short-term memory loss?” I found myself saying. “Maybe there was some kind of accident, so they tucked us away?”

  “Or prisoners?”

  “Prisoners who can’t remember who they are in a remarkably pleasant prison?”

  She shrugged, the gesture simultaneously encompassing both the unlikelihood of her statement and the improbability of our whole situation.

  We kept moving through the corridor without meeting anyone, albeit at a slow speed, stopping at each individual sound until we managed to source it (ventilation; another maintenance bot). I noticed in a strange, cut-off, observant part of the back of my mind how quickly, even athletically, I strode, how our clothes were civ-grade, how the lights were in power-saving mode, flickering on just ahead of us at regular intervals and returning to darkness once again behind us. And that same cool, observant part of my brain wondered how I knew this.

  We hadn’t gone more than a hundred meters when we found what we’d both been unconsciously itching for: an interface. I stopped short in front of it, as did the white-haired lady. She wore an old-fashioned faux hawk, I realized. My vision was better. I was even starting to get a flicker out of my left eye.

  “What do I call you?”

  I didn’t have to explain it’d be helpful to have something to yell if things went tight. She seemed to get the utility of it without prompting, thinking for a second before saying, “Phil.”

  I hitched a nod before I pointed to myself and said, “Su.”

  “Yes?” the interface said. We both blinked.

  “You’re Su?” I asked.

  “I knew that name sounded familiar,” Phil said. “Where are we?

  “First deck, corridor one.”

  “A ship,” I said, exhaling in relief. Somehow that made more sense, homed the few memories that flittered, unmoored, in my brain: pictures of my daughter at a deck, teaching her the stars, and long walks in corridors very like these. Phil nodded, looking amused, and at my arched, inquiring eyebrow, said, “I heard the secondaries earlier. I’d have known exactly where we were if I’d thought for half a second.”

  “Can you get us a readout of the decks, Ship Su? Priority one, keep it quiet.”

  “Where is everyone?” Phil muttered as maps populated the screen, the largest of which illustrated a large, spinning ship—not an interstellar ship, but an orbiting one, despite its distance from Earth. A damaged one, at that; the silhouette was partially disintegrated. “We should have seen others by now.”

  “Purpose of ship?” I asked.

  “Rehabilitation and comfortable accommodation of the elderly, with a special emphasis on regenerative and reimaginative therapies.”

  “Holy Krishna, we are broken,” Phil stuttered.

  “I don’t think so,” I murmured. “Who are we, Ship Su?”

  “Executive officer third rank Mios Safir and First Engineer Filipa Trujillo.” Ah: Fil, not Phil.

  “Interesting,” I said, noncommittal. The name she gave for me was false, I was sure of it. K? Had my name begun with a K? Kory, Konnie, K—

  “At least I can remember my own name,” Fil grumbled.

  I was about to ask Fil about my name when a light appeared down the farthest reach of the hall. Someone was approaching from around the corner. I instantly slid back/forward in a perfectly timed shuffle, tricking the lights into darkness. Something from younger days, I was sure, the remembrance almost within reach.

  “Sabotage? Mutiny?” Fil whispered.

  “It doesn’t make sense.” We sat in silence then as the civ approached us—civ for sure, as she wore civilian greenwear. I felt our mutual uncertainty in face of that green, and as I felt Fil tense, I acted on instinct.

  “Halt,” I called. “Identify yourself.”

  “Calm down, Auntie,” came a cool, competent voice from the slender approaching figure, her stride never breaking. “I should’ve known it was you. We need to take you back to the home center.” Her gait was young, her hair, even at a blurry distance, an unusual true blonde. The only blonde I could remember was my daughter, and it was almost a courtesy title; her hair was light brown by old Earth standards. And hair is easily dyed. But I hesitated. Auntie.

  “No,” Fil hissed in my ear. “Something’s wrong here. She’s lying. And she thinks there’s only one of us. We could take her.”

  The tension I’d felt before grew sharply. Fil’s breath audible, I turned toward her ever so slightly to tell her not to be an idiot, and the motion triggered the light overhead. Then the distant woman’s hand rose in a motion that was instantly familiar and unquestionably lethal.

  Fil and I broke in one motion, tearing off to the branching corridor nearest us and out of her line of sight. We booked it, so fast we had to skid to a halt twenty feet before the first turn, Fil ahead of me. I could hear our pursuer running after us as we both barked independent orders at Ship Su—lights out and emergency protocol nine and intruder alert, concealed staff presence, and a few other things that didn’t even make sense as they spilled out of our lips, about securing residences and initiating auto-care. We fell into darkness, the only light the faint emergency strips, dimmed almost beyond visibility, that lined the edges of the corridors, and we were forced into a slower pace.

  After a half-dozen turns we finally landed in a cul-de-sac, where Fil spouted ill-timed curses that I interrupted impatiently as I scanned for our next options. Then I sensed the change in gravity, edging up slightly as we moved farther out into the ship’s spin. In my mind’s eye I saw the curvature of my ship’s outward arms, languorous memories of building layouts and long-ago drills. I shook off the distraction. Running. We were running.

  “She can’t be capable of closing all the corridors or she’d have done it already. Where next?”

  I started moving before Fil finished speaking, and she raced after me.

  “Harvest room should be around here,” I snapped. “Back at the last corner we took.”

  “Seen a door?”

  “Looking.”

  We found it just as I was considering a move to another deck. We slipped in as quietly as we could while I hoped our silencing directives had worked as well as the lights-out orders. We slipped along in obscurity again to the back of the passage, our panting slowing as we looked for a good hiding place—not that we would have known in particular if we’d passed one, dark as it was.

  “How did the Executive Officer Third Rank and the First Engineer end up amnesiac and stuck in the home center? For that matter, why threaten your escaped citizens?” Fil’s voice was strong despite what we’d been through.

  “It’s worse than that,” I said. “You could say maybe we did work here, and had some kind of brain damage. Maybe my daughter thought I’d be less confused if I stayed on as a resident. But it doesn’t track, because why would our commands still work?”

  “Right. Security codes would’ve been altered.”

  “And that woman out there was no friend, maybe an intruder, but what kind of enemy keeps you around in the home center? What kind of administrator shoots her residents?”

  “And fixes your knee,” Fil added. “I had a problem knee. I’m sure of it. When I first was awake—really awake, not fuzzy awake—one of the first things I thought was, why doesn’t my knee hurt? I don’t remember much more than that—”

  She broke off. We had made it to what seemed like the back of the corridor, away from immediate visibility if our pursuer looked in. Emergency lights flared around us, illustrating two things at once:

  First, we were in a medical suite. Surrounded by chairs and diagnostic machines, the emergency treatment lights had been triggered by our movement, overriding our lights-out commands, I supposed, due to higher-level emergency protocols.

  Second, there were bodies.

  Two of them were rotting: two young men, hardly more than children
by my standards. They’d been dead for days. We hadn’t been warned of their presence through a smell because they were only half-visible under layers of prismwrap. The medical suite assistant must have identified the bodies and automatically wrapped them, awaiting further direction.

  But there were more. A rotational unit stood at the end of the hallway, a combination of opaque and transparent media, which allowed us to see three aging bodies waist-up. Two of them wore the pallor of jaundice, a shade that seemed too familiar. Fil stepped forward and entered a code, surprising herself, and the bodies rotated out of sight, new bodies replacing them. The vast majority of them were elderly, if not downright decrepit, but after a dozen such occupants, Fil’s hand froze up. A boy came into view, not yet thirteen. A child by anyone’s standards. I dug around in the interface and pulled up his chart.

  “This mean anything to you?” Fil asked.

  “Not really.” I said, “Ship Su, you still keeping us quiet?”

  “Yes,” she said—almost softly. I was sure I’d never heard a computer whisper before. It felt wrong, like a toddler singing opera: neither inherently bad, but entirely, nauseatingly wrong in conjunction.

  “Okay, then, two questions: one, what’s wrong with this kid, and two, what in the holy hell happened on this ship?”

  * * *

  It took two hours of probing, careful question by question, to understand what had happened. We learned that the boy was one of our attackers, injured in the first of several hostilities during the opening blows of a new war between the pro- and anti-Vitalists. The radical Vitalists were effectively in favor of ridding themselves of the older population that (they said) was sucking them dry. They were antiestablishment, but gaining favor as the population tipped upward of the inflection point of 70/70, with seventy percent of the population over seventy years of age. Even the most conservative camps had agreed that some kind of action needed to be taken—better use of existing protein sources, extended Mars facilities (though the cost was prohibitive enough that that had never gone anywhere), higher tax rates on the elderly in proportion to their use of services. But the Vitalists were in favor of far more, and had even officially broached the topic of legal euthanasia.