by Nathan Dodge
If I had begun the tests in flight, could I have saved the humans? Should they have sent a child with me, or more than one, however miserable the journey? If I had listened more closely to my heart, could I have heard my father’s wise advice and seen whatever error we made somewhere along the line? Or was there never any hope for them? If I were to live another thousand years, would I ever understand, the truth finally unveiled to me like shadow meeting dawn?
Were we descendants, or merely echoes?
A lonely wind cut into my thoughts, and I turned to better listen to it whistle amongst the formations where the children were. They played among the great shell structures, the labyrinth illuminated by the soft sidelights of the remnant ship. Distantly, I saw Terre join the children among the higher rocks, the children practicing their jumps from the natural platform. Their dancing shadows flickered and multiplied among the hollows as I watched, the shades of little children haunting every curve. And yet—I found a counterbalance in Ami’s weight in my arms: an anchor, a tangible pressure that demanded my attention away from those very shadows.
I held her up high and she laughed with delight, arms reaching upward toward the appearing stars.
And With the Earth Have Done
Nathan
We have cleared the main air traffic lanes.”
Molly’s voice was raspy over the din of liftoff; the speaker on the console had seen better days. Kessick meant to replace it, but more important chores kept interfering. The crammed racks of instruments and control apparatus now clattering in unison seemed to fail a lot. The main display video interface was the most recent casualty, its replacement the last spare. Liftoff and landing vibration caused most equipment failures.
Molly throttled thrusters back as the blue-green sky of Aerovale gradually darkened. She returned to their former conversation, taking up precisely where they had left off, even though he had completely lost the previous train of thought.
“Why didn’t your mom raise hell when you followed the profession that killed your dad?”
Ah, yes—his early career. “She knew I wouldn’t be happy otherwise.” Molly knew the story, but he continued because she loved it. “Fortunately, Dad bequeathed me good genes. After eight years in the Space Force, I went to National.”
“Then,” Molly said demurely, “you met me.”
“Yeah.” Kessick leaned back and prepared for the boredom of the next three weeks. At least, with cargo holds nearly empty, the ship would accelerate rapidly. In three weeks, far enough away from Aerovale’s sun, gravitational distortion would be negligible. Solar system exit and entrance were inchworm speed. The jump itself took no time at all.
“You were the hottest thing to come off the production line at the time.”
“You’re just saying that ’cause it’s true.”
“Of course. No jump errors, no computer glitches like the early ships.”
“That was long, long ago,” Molly said, a bit regretfully. “It’s thirty years later, and those aft deflectors are pretty shaky.”
“I’m putting in for a new set when we get back.”
“Right.” Molly’s tone said she’d heard it before. “Sure. Now we just sail past the second star to the right, and straight on till morning.”
“Thank you, Peter.”
“Call me Wendy. Or maybe Orphan Annie. I feel neglected. You haven’t read to me lately.”
“We didn’t have time. Besides, you can read to yourself.” The beginning of an old argument.
“It’s not the same; you know it.”
“We got nothing to do for weeks. There’ll be time.”
“There’d better be.”
Kessick felt abruptly lighter as grav generators cut in at 0.5 G, lessening bodily stresses. He unbuckled his harness.
Molly spoke up again. “Hey, it’s way past supper time, buddy.” The digital chronometer in the main display showed ship relative 8:17 PM.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Hungry or not, you need fuel—and sleep. Get a bite, hit the sack. You worked three straight fifteen-hour days. Go on, get outta here.”
He felt swamped with fatigue, which he would never admit. He blew a kiss to her video eyes and left.
She was silent as Kessick limped down the main corridor.
* * *
“How’s the leg?” Molly asked during breakfast.
Kessick eyed her speaker in the cramped kitchen warily, his hand wrapped tightly around his coffee cup. “Okay.”
“You’re not walking like it’s okay.”
Since the last jump, his left calf had ached. He thought he’d hidden it better. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“You hardly ate any breakfast.”
He forced a smile. “Just had to have some more of this great java.”
“It’s so sad when an old pilot confuses coffee with muddy water.”
“I’m going to my quarters now, where I can cut off ship audio.”
“No, you’re not. You promised we’d review jump coordinates before noon. Besides, you slept twelve hours. You coming down with a cold or something?”
Gathering his cup and a plate with remnants of toast and jelly, he said, “Still a little tired. The last three days were tough. I’ll be caught up on sleep by tomorrow.” Ditching trash in the recycler and inserting plate and cup into the cleaner/storage, he limped out of the galley.
The bridge was claustrophobic. Ship hallways were simply tight. In M-7, the dim main corridor, Kessick had to duck his head to avoid cable troughs and pipes stretching along the ceiling.
Approaching the bridge, he encountered a dark section, two ceiling fixtures unlit. “I swear I installed new LED arrays here not long ago.”
“You did. Sensors indicate no voltage past junction box thirty-three.”
Ship power was aft; Kessick headed back toward the galley.
“Check the junction box at M-seven-three-three.” As if he didn’t know.
At pillar 33, he removed the cover. A section of power cable had vaporized, leaving a dirty smear on the girder. “There’s evidence of an arc. The breaker blew, but it didn’t blow soon enough.”
“How bad?”
“Not terrible. The maintenance droid can make short work of it. Go ahead and activate it.”
“Remember, he won’t boot—his memory is bad. I can walk you through the repair. Okay?”
Not okay. Kessick frowned. “I’ll need some tools. It looks like the power line shorted to the support girder. We’ll have to replace a section.”
“You can do the repair later, but first the review,” Molly prodded.
He nodded, moving back toward the bridge.
“What was that?”
“Huh?”
“I don’t have a working camera where you’re standing, Cal. Was that yes or no?”
“I nodded yes. Sorry, I know your eyes aren’t good down here.”
Checking the jump sequence was a required duty, like the prelaunch check, and superfluous in Kessick’s opinion. The ship might be ancient, but Molly’s CPU and memory modules had been upgraded a few dozen hauls ago. To think he would catch something Molly might miss was ludicrous. Regardless, Molly was a stickler, so he went over it to humor her.
Sitting in his pilot seat, he guessed the answer but asked the question anyway, to show that he was paying attention. “Three jumps? It’s only about twenty-two hundred light years, total.”
“The deflectors are shaky. Longer jumps are less predictable. If I can’t jump precisely, we could end up farther away from home after a jump than before, you know that. Shorter jumps mean less stress.”
“You are such an old woman about some things.”
“You are such a teenager about everything.”
He stood. “Take your estrogen and I’ll fix the junction box.”
His expectations were confirmed when he returned to the breaker box. Decades of landing and liftoff vibration had abraded the insulation on the high voltage wire, causing the shor
t. The circuit breaker had malfunctioned, and by the time it killed the circuit, a length of copper wire had melted.
Kessick found one last roll of wire by rummaging through their nearly empty parts cabinet. If they needed LED clusters like the ones in the main corridor lamps, he and Molly were out of luck. Muttering, he carried the wire back to the corridor.
The replacement took time. Finally finished, he reset the new breaker, and the lights activated to add spots of illumination to the perpetually dim corridor. With a weary good night to Molly, he went to bed without supper.
* * *
After breakfast, Kessick went to the lounge, a small room with meter-square sapphire windows looking out across the outer reaches of the Milky Way’s Orion Spur. A spectacular view of a swirling nebula that sat close to Aerovale’s sun sat front and center, making a colorful picture. At left, a group of hot, young stars bare light years away lit the cloud from within with splashes of color. At the nebular boundary to its right, occasional streaks of blue and red highlighted bright edges and dark shapes. Still-forming stars created solar winds that sculpted areas of dust into grotesque darker shapes that stood out against the illuminated background. It reminded Kessick of lying on his back at the edge of the stream that ran through his grandfather’s farm long years ago. Just as he had then, staring up at the clouds above, he could marvel at the shapes, picking out birds and horses and knights with swords and a huge, winged dragon.
After admiring the view, he retired to the threadbare sofa opposite the view ports.
Knowing that Molly watched as well, he said, “What a sight.”
“You should see the X-ray view,” Molly replied.
“Mmm. Do X-rays have color?”
“Sure. That is, the X-rays vary in the way they stimulate my sensors just as your eyes respond to different wavelengths of light. So essentially, yes, they have color.”
“Sorry I asked.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “So, what it is today?”
“Thought I’d leave the choice up to you. What’ll it be?”
She was silent a moment. “I think Elizabeth Browning. You know I love Sonnets from the Portuguese. Perhaps … number ten.”
He made a great show of looking it up in his reader index, finding the page, and scanning it carefully. Finally he said, “Ready?”
“I’ve been ready for roughly four quadrillion computation cycles, while you fuddled around just to piss me off.”
With a sly grin, Kessick began to read:
“Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,
Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light
Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:
And love is fire. And when I say at need
I love thee … mark! … I love thee—in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face toward thine. There's nothing low
In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature's.”
After a moment’s silence she said, “That’s my favorite.”
Kessick enjoyed poetry, but he read love sonnets for Molly. “I don’t see it. Why?”
“Don’t you see? The ‘meanest creatures.’ Even the least in creation can love.” She sounded wistful.
“You mean like rabbits or foxes in love? Give me a break.”
“I’d like to give you something, all right.” Her voice got harsher. “Come to the bridge. We got a problem.” Kessick swore and left the lounge. It occurred to him that he was swearing a lot more lately.
As he took his seat, the forward display showed a schematic of a rear deflector. “What now?”
“I was testing Rear Four. Micro current bursts, to get a feel for how shaky it is. It quit responding.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s kind of what ‘quit responding’ means, Cal.”
He started to swear under his breath again, caught himself. “Spares?”
“One unused pulser and a shaky used one.”
“Unused, as in new?”
“Sorta.”
This time he did swear.
“Quit mumbling.”
“I am not mumbling, Molly, I am cursing as discreetly as I can. What the hell is ‘sorta’ new?”
“It failed during installation. Repaired and included as a spare.”
“Well, that’s just peachy.” As he walked down Main 7, a passageway speaker squawked. “Where are you going?”
“Where else?” He didn’t raise his voice, as most microphones along the main corridor actually worked.
Main 7 ran the length the ship, between the cargo bays, to the engine room main hatch. Levering it open, he stepped onto a dizzyingly high platform—dizzying because “aft” had suddenly become “down,” due to the local grav field. Crossing a catwalk, he descended stairs that circled the wall.
The engine room held the power supply plus pulse generators for the rear deflectors, the main jump transducers arranged at ninety-degree intervals around the outer hull. A smaller deflector array circled the waist of the ship.
Each deflector base held a pulser, power conduits inserted into rear sockets. Other than deflectors, the circular floor space held only the power supply plus equipment lockers and four storage units for spare pulsers, two of which were empty. Sapphire inspection ports allowed visual perusal of the arrays. The engine room, mainly empty space, had been designed to isolate pulsers and deflectors from the rest of the ship, due to the huge fields that jumps generated.
Problem was, the heavy shielding of the faulty pulser prevented any diagnosis. Kessick eyed it. “I guess there’s no way to fix it.”
The wall speaker above him came to life. “Not a friggin’ chance, pal. Factory repair only.”
“I’ve never replaced a pulser. I’ll need to reference the replacement procedure.”
“I can access the equipment database and relay info. The main thing I’m worried about is the winch.”
Kessick glanced up. “When was it last used?”
Five seconds passed. “Sorry, the data was on a deep storage optical unit. Two pulsers were replaced on Earth, ten subjective years ago, March 2165. You were on vacation, leaving me behind. Sniff.”
“I remember the vacation. Saw Mom, slept late every morning. Don’t remember the replacements.”
“Come on! I briefed you the day you got back.”
“I’m sure you did; I just don’t remember. So it hasn’t been used for ten years. Has it been serviced?”
“Mmm. Annual maintenance records don’t mention the winch.”
“That’s just peachy.”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“So I am. The point is, it hasn’t been checked in a decade.”
“Try it.”
“I already thought of that, Molly.” Kessick dug the remote out of its wall socket. Activating power, he pushed the extend lever.
The winch hung from a support beam some six meters up. With a protesting whine, the motor activated. Kessick rotated the winch elbow and guided the arm jerkily toward the number four hub.
“It’s a little stiff,” Molly observed.
“Yeah, but it works.”
Through the viewports, each deflector resembled an old rooftop stacked-Yagi radio antenna from the history books, except that the elements were slats, not round bars, and there were more of them. Pulsers plugged into the socket bases in the engine room. The hollow center of the mast held cables that carried current to the individual slats.
Accompanied by massive profanity, punctuated with a few soothing words and directions from Molly, Kessick connected the winch to the pulser, retracting it to put tension on the cable.
After disconnecting the power cables, it took another hour to loosen the sixteen massive bolts, arranged at equal intervals around the circular perimeter of the pulser body.
Physical connection undone, he activated the winch arm to lift the pulser outward and up, pulling it free from the socket. The pulser weighed two metric tons, mainly shielding, so caution was the order of the day. As it came out of the socket it swung wildly, and he had to jump back to avoid being crushed.
The stiffness of the internal pulser cabling and the inertia of the pulser body slowly killed its oscillation. At Molly’s direction, Kessick disconnected the internal forty-plus power lines to the array elements, a slow and exacting task. At least he didn’t have to worry about tagging each cable; each socket and plug were color-coded to avoid reconnection problems. The pulser free, he deposited it into an empty storage container.
An obscenity-laced hour later, he had the spare connected to the winch, lifted from the storage box, and positioned next to the deflector socket. Connecting the internal cables took forever. Kessick wiped sweat from his face and surrendered.
“I gotta take a break. What time is it?”
“Eight PM. You didn’t even break for lunch. Shower, eat, go to bed. That pulser ain’t a-goin’ nowhere, pardner.”
“I hate your western accent.”
“No, you don’t. It makes you laugh.”
He grunted, more in exasperation than denial, and climbed the stairway. After a two-minute sluice-off, he crashed.
As he fell onto the sheets, Molly said, “You didn’t have any food.”
Half-asleep, he muttered, “Sorry, mother.”
“You always act four years old.”
“And you’re always right.”
“Mothers usually are.”
Before he could make a stinging reply, sleep claimed him.
* * *
At breakfast, Kessick went through toast and sausage, a waffle, and real maple syrup, Molly remaining silent. He couldn’t remember a time they had not talked at breakfast.
In the lounge, he spent a moment on the striking view, then sat. Opening his reader, he thumbed to poetry and finally asked, “You there, or are you sulking?”