But there’s only the breeze. No other sounds of life. I might be alone here. We might be alone here, if Kodiak survived the crash.
The only other human in the universe. “Kodiak!”
How big is this planet? Does it have anything we can eat on it? How long will this night last? Will the breeze kick up into a superstorm? I wasn’t trained in any of the answers, because I was sent on a false mission. Given what I’m seeing, I can only assume that what my recorded voice told me is true.
I won’t let this planet master me. I’ll find a way forward.
Think, Ambrose. Unless they sent me here just to die, which would make this the most expensive execution in history, mission control must have provided the information I’ll need to survive this exoplanet somewhere within the ship. “OS,” I call. No answer.
I pick myself out of the puddle and, flailing like a new surfer, manage to get to my feet. The landscape is low and almost flat, heathered in soft moist growths that I can’t quite distinguish in this dimness. In the scant starlight, I can see the devastation that the ship’s crash wreaked on this unsuspecting planet. Two giant skid marks shine, lit up from within by some sort of phosphorescence riled up by the friction—I assume from a microorganism that lives in the soil. More evidence of life. The shining strips point far into the distance; the ship skidded a long way before coming to rest here.
“Kodiak?” I call again. I have a suspicion where he is, though. One skid mark leads to the broken piece of ship I woke up in. The other disappears into a dark pond before reappearing on the far side. The ship must have broken into two. Kodiak is in the other half. If he’s alive at all.
Though all my mind tells me is pain, pain, pain, I try to bully it into logic. Priority one is to get warm clothing, preferably a spacesuit, since who knows what foreign organisms or spores might already be making their way into my body. I have to find a way to hydrate. And I have to track down Kodiak.
Well, well, Minerva. Looks like I’m mounting an extraterrestrial base camp rescue after all.
The Endeavor will never be a ship again, that’s for sure. The wreckage is open on three sides, and whole chambers are missing, probably strewn across this planet. I find no spacesuits in the debris, but there is a broken helmet—it looks gouged by a tool, strangely enough, more than just damaged in a crash—and in the dim sunlit night I find a supply of blankets, all piled together. I band my arms and legs and torso with them, fastening them with the polycarb-printed restraints from my bunk. I wrench a pipe from the wreck to use as a support, and start along the glowing path toward the other half of the Coordinated Endeavor, calling out Kodiak’s name as I go.
I’m short of breath as soon as I start, and it only gets worse. At first I think it’s my body responding to the trauma of my wake-up and then crash, but then I realize because of the low oxygen I’ve now probably got altitude sickness on top of my body’s other current complaints. At least there’s nothing left in my stomach to come up.
I soon prove myself wrong, leaving a puddle of organic material on the dark ground. Though dimly lit by the distant sun, the night feels permanent. Until I can salvage the data on the ship’s computer, I have no way of knowing how long this planet’s rotation is. This exoplanet night could be only a few hours, or it could last the equivalent of six months or more.
Horror lives right alongside wonder as I make my nighttime trek. It’s like the universe has split open, or has revealed that it was split open all along, that we’d always been teetering over a void. This strange land, with its unknown sky and its unknown core, and this strange quest my lighter-than-real body is taking to save a stranger, threaten to set me spinning off into that void.
A light appears at the horizon as I trudge, and at first I think I’m getting my first glimpse of the larger sun. But I’m not; I’ve crested a shallow rise of crumbly soil, and gotten a view of the second half of the downed ship, its surfaces reflecting the light of the planet’s distant second sun.
I speed up, my steps easily becoming leaps in the low gravity.
I listen for any sounds, any movements in the sky, and signs of advanced life. But these microorganisms under my feet seem to be it so far. Kodiak and I could be as advanced as it gets around here.
“Kodiak!” I call.
The wind whistles.
My vision brightens as I go, and at first I think it’s because I’m nearing the flaming wreckage. I realize, though, that dawn is finally arriving. The orb that’s emerging is the same size and color as the sun I’ve always known.
Have I ever seen that Earth sun?
This planet is a soft yellow-green color, rocky, all its surfaces covered in a heath of algae. It’s a little like how the early Earth might have looked. The sun and the wind and the cold are the only enemies, and without predators and prey, life has no need to move around, to have eyes and teeth. It can be . . . soft.
“Kodiak?” I call.
There’s another orange portal here, lit by the dual suns. Unlike mine, this one is sealed tight. The ship behind it is virtually identical to my own. “Kodiak?”
I giggle, and then stop. Why did I just giggle?
I easily leap up to the portal, and use my weight—lighter here, but still of enough use for these purposes—to pull the handle down with me.
The Aurora is dark. I take one step, then another, taking in the Dimokratía text on the wall, the polycarb floor barely lit by the rays of the distant sun. “Kodiak?”
This time I hear a response. A groan. I rush along the corridor. The farther I get from the orange portal the darker it gets, until I’m going mainly on sound and touch, relying on my memory of training in a model of my own ship. “Kodiak? I’m here.”
He’s in the same room as me, but I can’t see a thing. “Flashlight . . . against wall,” he says, the words strangled.
I grope along the wall until I find the light, then click it on.
Kodiak is in a fetal position, lit in jumping shadows by the flashlight, hands pinned between his thighs. “Leg,” he says. “Broken.”
There’s a bump on his calf, visible even beneath the fabric of his suit. “May I?” I ask.
He nods, grimacing. Flashlight between my teeth, I gingerly raise the pant leg. The bone hasn’t burst out of the skin, but it will definitely need setting and splinting. If we can get the portaprinter operational, we’ll make a cast.
“Are you in much pain?” I ask. “I can see if I can track down meds.”
“Your voice,” he says through gritted teeth. “Are you drunk?”
“No, I’m not th-runk,” I say. Well. I guess that did sound slurred.
Kodiak sniffs. “Narcosis. There’s more nitrogen in this atmosphere than we’re used to. Judging by my headache, too, there’s some trace cyanide.”
Who is this guy? “That headache could also be, um, from your shattered tibia.”
“Fibula. Otherwise we’d be in significant trouble. Speaking of—” He winces, his voice breaking off.
“Splint. Right. I’m on it.”
“And maybe some pain meds. If you do find some.”
“Thought you might take me up on that.”
I seal the orange door, to take advantage of whatever lower levels of nitrogen might be in the Aurora for now. The next three nights, Kodiak and I don’t leave the ship. We live by flashlight. Kodiak limps through the engineering bay, gritting his teeth against the pain as he tries to restore power to the ship. I stare through the windows, observing our environment. This is the kind of gradual exposure to the exoplanet’s atmosphere we would have done if our ship hadn’t crashed.
Judging by the primary sun’s progress, the days on the exoplanet will be approximately thirty-one Earth hours long. The sky is blue, but with tints of green.
There doesn’t appear to be much weather at all, no matter the time of day. My guess is that OS intentionally crashed us onto one of the poles of the planet to avoid weather extremes, which would also help explain the wetness of the ground. Of cou
rse, seasons could last many Earth years each. We might be in the equivalent of ten years’ worth of winter.
At least I’m hoping this is winter. I’ve been walking around bundled in blankets. This had better not be what summer looks like.
We get rudimentary power to the Aurora’s systems, enough that I can get a piece of the ship’s wall under a scope and enlarge the minuscule writing that repeats on it like wallpaper. It’s the missive my voice promised it left for me, back on the Endeavor. The one that would explain what happened to the previous copies of myself.
I transfer it to a bracelet so I can read it throughout the day. To discover the truth of what’s come before.
I read highlights aloud to Kodiak while we eat dinner. He doesn’t comment, just stares back at me while I read, his eyes glittering.
Judging from the text, apparently my old selves initially resisted the news that they were clones, that Minerva was dead, all of it. Here in this darkened Dimokratía ship, taking care of a wounded stranger on a foreign planet, I find it all surprisingly easy to accept. I have the proof I need right in front of me, after all. There must be an exoplanet, because I’m on it. We can be the last humans, because that’s also what my eyes are telling me. To land here is a wilder thing than to be a clone.
Kodiak keeps his movements to a minimum, elbow-crawling to one spot of the ship to work on, then finishing whatever he can there before risking jostling his leg again. He doesn’t betray much pain on his face, but all the same I know the agony he must be feeling. We’ve constructed the best splint for him that we can, banding a thin mattress to his leg, but it’s clearly not enough.
Everything that Cusk mission control placed on the ship for our landing is behind a gray portal, on the outside of the Endeavor. I’ve apparently spent lifetimes wondering what’s behind it. But for now we’re trapped on the Aurora. There’s no way we’re making that hike back to the Endeavor anytime soon, not with Kodiak in his condition.
Kodiak and I give each other long looks as we work near each other. These same eyes have traveled all of his body, these same hands have held his, have parted that jumpsuit and explored what’s beneath. Will do that, judging by the messages we left. I study the line of his neck, and I wonder. I study his dusky eyelashes, and I wonder. I study the power of his legs, and I wonder.
He looks back at me, and I know he is wondering, too.
On the third day, I wake up and head to my now-usual spot at the largest window on the Aurora, with its view over the bioluminescent plains. My clock has reset to these longer days—but then again, I guess I never was alive during any other circadian clock. This planet isn’t my new home; it’s the only home I’ve ever had.
Each time I take in the vista, I expect to find some lumbering horror wandering up over the horizon, or skyscrapers of strange storm bearing down upon us. But it’s always the same calm landscape. A primordial world, with only the simplest forms of life.
OS did well to steer us here.
Kodiak eases over to sit beside me, splinted leg out long in front of him. “How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Good enough,” he responds. “Tomorrow we go to the Endeavor.”
We’re drunk by the time we get there. Not a fun kind of drunk, not making-out-with-Sri-in-a-field drunk, but the queasy we’re-in-trouble kind of drunk. We’re jittery and rattled as the ship looms into view.
The Endeavor isn’t sealed like the Aurora, so there’s no decompressing the nitrogen out of our bloodstream. Higher nitrogen content is our new reality; we’ll just have to live with it until our bodies adjust. We make our way to the dining chamber, now rent open on the side, the glowing single-celled life-forms of this planet spreading along its jagged edges. “We have company for dinner,” Kodiak says, squinting at the mats of organisms.
We sit and hold our heads in our hands. “I feel really shitty,” I say.
Kodiak nods. “Yeah. That’s a word for it.”
He closes his eyes heavily, lips trembling.
I try to close my own eyes, but the world spins too much. I open them again and manage to make the world right itself just enough to stop me from vomiting. “I’m also overwhelmed,” I say. “Totally overwhelmed.”
He does nothing at first, and loneliness swells in me. Then there’s a hand on my neck. I can’t help myself; I press my cheek against it. Kodiak kneads my shoulder. It feels like the kindest thing anyone has ever done. When he opens his arms, I fall in deep.
We stand before the gray portal.
I couldn’t say we’re sober now, not exactly, but after a few hours of clutching each other and wincing, we’re able to stay on our feet. We even kept some water down, raided from the ruins of 04.
“Go ahead,” Kodiak says brusquely, pointing to the doorway.
“Maybe together?” I say.
His hand appears next to mine. Together we activate the portal. It sighs before it shudders open.
We keep our hands held.
On reflex, I turn on my headlamp. Then I turn it back off, because at that very moment a light blinks on inside the chamber.
“Look at that!” I say under its dim orange glow. A massive battery covers one wall of the storage chamber, its wires disappearing into the floor. “Auxiliary power!”
Kodiak lowers himself to examine one particularly large cable that leads to a nondescript box. “A generator. That appears to run on methane. Clever.”
“I’m going to assume, since mission control thought to design it that way, methane is a big part of what’s in these shallow lakes surrounding us.” Methane has no scent, and without power running to the ships, I haven’t yet been able to run tests to determine the composition of the atmosphere—except for the low oxygen and obviously spiked nitrogen. Mission control would have been able to select this planet based on spectroscopy: even from so many light-years away, they could have determined which colors of light were being absorbed on the planet, how much its atmospheric particles bent light, and how big they were, and thus have a pretty good idea of how hospitable to human life the environment would be. It’s no accident that this is where OS worked so hard to bring us.
Kodiak leans past the box, moving surprisingly agilely considering his splinted leg, and hands me a big black padded envelope.
I open it. Inside is a book. A real vintage book! Hard polycarb cover, printed on plasticine pages. There’s a title on the front: Surviving Sagittarion Bb.
“Now that sounds like a good read,” I say, and open to page one.
“We can make it a bedtime story?” Kodiak says. He laughs, but then the laugh stops and he’s looking at me and I’m looking at him.
“It’s midday,” I say, standing and holding out my hand. “But it might be bedtime on Earth.”
He stands up without taking my hand. His body looms over mine.
Staring into my eyes all the while, he wraps his heavy arms around me, presses me close against his chest. He smells like the planet—clean, a little loamy. I breathe the human scent, enjoy the sensation of his body warming mine.
“There are things I’ve told myself to learn about from you,” Kodiak whispers, chin resting on the top of my head. “Something about welcoming and donating?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling. “We have lots of time for lessons.”
I go quiet, clutching the black book to my chest as I stare out at the alien landscape. “Between those times, we will fight to live.”
Somehow, before two weeks have gone by, we’ve constructed a full-on compound. There’s nothing casual about the process—our very lives depend on getting this right, and we toil for twenty-five of the thirty-one Earth hours in each day.
We start by placing the generator near the shallow methane swamp, so we’ll have a virtually unlimited power source. The Endeavor’s landing stash also came equipped with algae, which I’ve spent most of our time coaxing into a garden. It’s not just any algae, but bioengineered so that each strain produces a protein, a fat, or a carbohydrate. Granted, they’re not th
e tastiest proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but together they’ll provide complete nutrition.
While Kodiak works on powering up our systems, I plant the individual algal strains under polycarb sheeting that’s engineered to intensify the low solar radiation of the exoplanet. There’s a lot I wish I could be doing—like getting a proper home constructed—but food is lower on our pyramid of needs.
One morning, Kodiak has rolled out of bed before me. I miss his warmth, which disappears so quickly into the polycarb. As I groggily get to my feet, wishing for some of the coffee my mind remembers but that my lips have never actually tasted, I hear Kodiak call my name.
He’s in front of the greenhouse, crouching beside what appears to be Rover. Or rather two Rovers that he’s combined to make a full sphere, with arms emerging from its equator. It’s very creepy and also very cute. “What have you done?” I ask Kodiak, giving him a quick kiss on the lips.
“Watch!” Kodiak says. “Rover, say hello to Ambrose.”
Rover rotates and rolls over the heath on the ground, until it’s right in front of me. The arms wave. “Hello, Ambrose,” OS says. “This is my form now. I’ve come to assist you and Kodiak.”
The sound of my mother’s voice on this foreign planet stops my breath. When it begins again, I’m wiping tears from my eyes. “Hi, OS.”
“I will be a better algae tender than either of you. Please let me take over those duties. I’m also happy to begin constructing roomier lodgings.”
“Kodiak,” I say. “This is amazing. OS is here.”
Rover-sphere chatters on. “I will be careful to keep the algae strains from escaping the polycarb greenhouse. We don’t want any unexpected interactions with the exoplanet’s organisms. I can tinker with the quantities to alter your nutritional intake—and even produce an alternative jet fuel should you someday wish that I print us vehicles. There are many engineering designs in my storage.”
The Darkness Outside Us Page 25