by Ginger Booth
“So wake me when you’ve been alone for a week,” Clay compromised. “You take me for granted, Sass. That ends now.”
Sass scowled. What was he, a one-year-old, to demand constant attention? Of course she took him for granted! What else was a relationship good for? Maybe she should have listened harder. But this was outrageous!
He stripped, and hopped into his shelf. “Prep me.”
She tucked him in, and spread the gel, again waiting on the eyes. The cool sensation of the lubricant’s evaporation reminded her of a morphine injection, long ago and far away when she was human. She checked on Dot’s progress. Darren was out cold, a corpsicle on his tray. He breathed, and his heart beat, but those slow slight movements failed to lift the thick blanket.
She gulped, and turned back to Clay’s eyes, still open. “I’m sorry. I do love you, Clay.” You’re just annoying. But he was infinitely better company than no one. And who else remembered Earth? Raw Mahina before they built its atmosphere? “I took for granted you’d keep me company all the way to Sanctuary. Please. Don’t do this.”
His eyes met hers, dark chocolate and furious. “One week. Alone. No Dot, no Darren or Remi, completely alone. Then you can wake me.” He closed his eyes tight and nodded sharply. “Ready.”
Dragging it out, she finished prepping him, including the electrodes, and the stretchy insulated hair net to keep them in place. She flinched as Dot pushed Darren’s shelf shut, then Remi’s, steel wheels trundling the rails into the back wall. The cupboard doors closed with a snick, advising a good seal.
Dot arrived business-like to inspect Sass’s work on Clay, and found all in order. She drew two humongous syringes, ready for Sass to inject. Then the nurse stripped and made herself comfortable on a drawer.
“I’m beginning to relish this,” Dot claimed. “Like a restful spa treatment with cucumber slices on my eyes. You’ll love it, Clay.”
“I doubt that very much, Dot.”
The nurse laughed, then directed Sass to give Clay his injection first, so she could guide the captain through reading his vital signs.
Sass caught a mumbled ‘love you’ while she studied Clay’s tell-tales on her tablet. His diagnostics read rock-steady as he drifted into unconsciousness. Then Sass repeated the procedure on Dot.
Her tablet pinged to report Clay’s body temperature in the hypothermic range, below 35˚ C – 95˚ in the Fahrenheit of their youth.
“This’ll make Darren horny,” were the last words the nurse uttered. Sass cocked a dubious eyebrow. But euphoria was a phase of hypothermia. It couldn’t hurt to keep a happy thought.
She lay the tablet aside and ran a hand along Clay’s washboard abs, muffled beneath the thermal blanket. She didn’t touch his gelled face. Then she pushed his shelf into the wall with the rest. By then the system pinged that Dot was ready for the same.
And Sass was alone.
She walked along the cabinets, counting the green lights of occupied slabs, and the blue lights of empties.
The long months outbound were bad enough. At least she could call old friends on Mahina. And Clay reliably clamored for attention
She turned to leave, gazing down from this odd perspective onto her echoing ship. She could almost see the ghosts of her crew striding the catwalk. The zero-g ball games. The missing slide and mushroom. Dot pestering her husband, bent over a workbench ignoring her. Remi teaching the green crew to muck out the recycling. Flamboyant Kassidy Yang and the Denali envoy Aurora, leading tug-of-war grudge matches across the same cesspit. Cope and Walker pounding each other for sport. Ben and Eli, Jules and Abel egging them on. She missed them all so fiercely she ached.
She whispered to herself, “Get a grip, Collier.”
She picked up the box of castoffs, and hopped down to the accommodation level with a flick of her grav generator. Remi didn’t install a ladder to the cryo bay. They wore their personal grav generators everywhere. She landed by the stairs, then stepped down to the med-bay. She cleaned the syringes, ready and waiting for wake-up day.
Storing the box of personal effects on a shelf, she paused to sniff Clay’s shirt.
Now that’s just maudlin. “Computer, erase the last 5 minutes from med-bay video logs!” She shoved the box into its spot. She resolved never to sniff again.
The med-bay lights remained on as a safety measure, a bright white beacon through smoke in case of fire. She tried lowering the work lights in the hold to their evening settings, then immediately restored the usual schedule. Her mental health required a steady progression of light levels through the blank 24-hour cycles stretching before her.
What shall I do today?
Her tablet pinged lunchtime. She wasn’t hungry, but seized on the event. She should program more activities into the thing, to regularly draw her to another part of the ship.
Pops and sighs sounded throughout the old boat, as heating and ventilation cycles warmed and cooled and blew. She tried to focus on her footfalls instead as she climbed up to the catwalk. The steel rungs echoed.
The truth was, being alone was her deepest fear, ever since she gradually became aware that she couldn’t die. While humanity died in its billions. She suspected that’s why she bought Thrive. If Mahina perished, she’d fly away.
She opened the fridge to find the housekeeper left her several containers of salad fixings – just tear some fresh greens and dump these on top. The gift was like receiving a quick hug. Even better, since Sass cringed from Corky’s bearhugs.
Each bore a little note. ‘Spice up your day!’ ‘Something’s fishy,’ and ‘Better with bacon!’
Sass smiled as intended. Bless Corky! She’d have to remember to thank the booming battle-ax next year.
99
Staring at Corky’s kind gift of salad fixings, Sass reflected that she’d harvest daily. Most of the produce she’d throw straight into recycling. Copeland and Eli determined long ago that composting was pointless. They developed presets to generate recycled potting mix on demand, and skip the stinky pile of rotting veggies.
Gardening afternoons at 15:00, she decided, and entered a recurring appointment into her tablet. Review engine burns at 10:00. And 21:00, why not. After each navigation check, she could review ship diagnostics.
She prepared Corky’s taco salad. While picking at it, she struggled to think of something to do between now and gardening time. And where she’d like to do it. Though she intended to structure her days, part of that regime should be to do something fresh.
The Nanomage database, she thought, without enthusiasm. Drilling into data bored her silly. Clay was the analyst. Sass preferred to investigate stories and motives face-to-face, not follow wispy trails in cyberspace.
How to make this fun?
She had VR, their virtual reality setup. She was leery of how addictive it could become, starved as she’d be for companionship. But maybe she could construct virtual Ganymede, Luna, and Mars colonies. She’d study the origins of the people she’d meet on Sanctuary.
She doubted many on Sanctuary would remember their roots directly. The Colony Corps crew that brought her to Mahina arrived here 63 years ago, objective. The rogue nanite designer Belker acted without permission when he made Sass and Clay immortal. No telling whether Belker left any other Methuselahs behind. But the Gannies picked up the early phase of Mahina nanite technology to prolong their lives, if they chose.
She might meet wildcatters. In addition to crewing the vast refugee ships, the Colony Corps sent explorers outward to seek better worlds. For the ‘first shell’ – the seven systems of the Diaspora – they obeyed an arbitrary 20-year emergency time limit. They sent out probes, then surveyed any real estate they found, no matter how cruddy, like the Aloha system. Perforce, all the worlds were within 10 light years of Earth.
But they continued searching outward for more promising worlds beyond. These explorers would have taken one look at the Aloha star system and burned straight for the exit warp, seeking better. They sent no probes ahead. They
jumped blind, because they couldn’t predict which systems would survive for their probes to report back to, after decades lost to warp. But they brought the coordinates to rendezvous at Sanctuary when their work was done.
Sass would love to meet a wildcatter. They might remember Earth.
But even if few remembered their first colonies, the society on Sanctuary would be based on them. And she had nothing better to do.
Project selected. She’d start with Ganymede. She’d met them, after all. Now that she thought about it, she was curious about their home.
She settled to work in the dining room, with its enormous display. She cranked some tunes to mask the lonely pings and sighs of the air vents. The careful research and drafting soothed her, reminding her of early years on the farm with good friends by her side, planning the fields and irrigation mesh.
Her virtual colony would feature five floors, three of them stacked and another two in detached working domes.
By the time her timer prompted her to head for the garden, she’d laid out half the first floor of her new virtual Ganymede Colony. On a roll, she told it to ping her again in an hour. When the prompt repeated, she’d started on the second level.
Ready for a break, she cut the music and grabbed her harvest basket. Her body longed to move, so she took a running start and leapt over the catwalk railing to sail into the hold below, landing a meter shy of the far bulkhead.
“Sass!”
She spun and craned her neck. Clay sat perched on the edge of the dark cryo platform, in damp underwear, feet dangling. She laughed. Nearly naked, face and neck glistening with goop, he must be freezing. She bet he sat there arguing with himself over whether to jump and break a few bones, or wait.
“I’ll be right up!” She ducked into the med-bay to retrieve his things. Then she flipped her gravity to run up the wall to reach him.
“All I needed was the grav generator,” Clay griped. “Thanks.” He slung it around his hips.
“Cryo doesn’t work on our nanites,” she guessed.
“No. Blacked out for maybe 20 minutes. Been sitting here ever since. Guess you found something to do.”
Her eyes narrowed. “On the Vitality. Did you try cryo before?” Even as a freshly implanted nanite being, Clay was self-destructive, forever teasing to find the limits of their immortality.
“Only as an experiment. Different drugs.” He hopped down to the catwalk next to crew quarters, and she followed. “Excuse me while I sluice off.”
He started toward their quarters on automatic, then paused to look back at the crew quarters. Their 8-person bath was enormous. He shrugged and headed that way instead.
“I’ll join you!”
“No.”
“Aw, c’mon, Clay. I got lonely without you. You made your point!”
“Still no.”
“So did Dot’s nanites make you impotent? Inquiring minds.”
He turned and fixed her with the most exasperated glare he’d ever bestowed on her. And that was saying something, because she often elicited that response. “Go to hell, Collier!”
“I came up with a project –”
He slammed the bunkroom door in her face. The giant bath was only accessible through the crew quarters.
He’ll change his mind soon enough, Sass consoled herself. Or his libido nanites would change it for him. She clanked down the stairway to the garden humming, to pick veggies and fruit for two.
Only 508 more empty days to fill. Those wildcatters must have been the craziest men and women alive.
Sixteen months later, the couple played ball on Mars with Dot and Darren, Remi and Corky.
Sass nearly forgot that the VR colony mockups were her idea, so thoroughly had Clay embraced the project. Each of them had a favorite. Sass liked Ganymede best, reminding her of Pono with its views of lovely Jupiter, though it lacked Pono’s glorious ice rings. Remi agreed. Ganymede reminded him of his childhood on Sagamore.
Mahina urbs Dot and Darren preferred Luna Colony. The privileged classes there had a cerebral bent.
Clay and Corky favored Mars. Not because the colony was anything special. The landscape was orange, with no pretty planet above, and puny moons. The sky was often blotted out by storms, more frequent in VR than ever in life. Clay was proud of his roiling dust storms. Churning brown buffeted the geodesic dome above their heads.
No, what they loved about Mars was its penchant for hard-core sports, the more likely to draw blood the better. Today’s game was ga-ga, a form of dodge-ball played in a hexagonal pit. The players struck the whizzing hard rubber ball with their hands, trying to hit each other, often with bank shots off the walls. A single hit below the belt eliminated a player.
Sass leapt up a meter and half – Mars gravity was 0.4 g. She hit the ball with the side of her hand, and slammed it into Corky’s butt. “Score!” Everyone heckled the housekeeper as she flipped Sass the bird and bounded out to join Dot and Remi, already struck out of the running.
“You think you’re hot stuff, huh?” Darren dribbled basketball-fashion. He wore his Clark Kent glasses even in virtual. He claimed they were part of his self-image.
“She’s going down!” Clay vowed. He played in the nude today. Sass refused to acknowledge the misbehavior.
Just as the ball left Darren’s serve against the wall, the computer gave an articulated three-tone bleep. “Captain, we received a hail from the asteroid belt.”
The ball bounced a couple times, chest high, as the players stood stunned.
“On my way,” Sass replied. She navigated the exit menu and vanished to her galley. She pulled off the headset, snagging her hair.
Around her at the table, her team roused likewise. Corky collected the headsets to stow them. Sass waited until her butt was back in its chair.
“Computer, play message.”
A woman appeared on the screen, with smoothly tan oval face and regular features, race ambiguous. Her black hair pulled back into a severe bun. She wore a sleek rose-colored pressure suit, its style reminiscent of the grey Ganny Colony Corps uniforms. The Mandarin collar bore simple gold pips above a slanted zip front. She looked about 25, like everyone else.
The image quality was poor, static shooting throughout. The spacefarers were used to that from the signal-scattering rings of Pono.
For a moment the woman held still, staring into the camera with a pleasant expression not quite a smile. “Greetings, unknown vessel. This is Sanctuary Control. Please state your intentions.” She froze, her pose identical to the one she started with.
“End of message,” the computer noted.
100
Sass sat with mouth slightly open, staring at the woman on the big display. Then she exploded out of her seat and rushed to the galley head, to straighten her hair and adjust her shirt.
No, her T-shirt and overalls weren’t good enough for this, her first hail to the Sanctuarese. Sanctuarii? She should ask what they called themselves. She peeled out for her cabin to change and put on makeup. No, the talking head wore no makeup. Well, she wasn’t as pale as Sass, but maybe she could limit herself to lipstick –
“Stop.” Clay barred her way with an extended arm. “Talk first, then primp.”
Sass scowled at him. “You give me pointers on how to make a first impression? While you march around naked? Clothes, Mr. Rocha!”
“We need a strategy –”
“Clay, women can think while dressing. That’s why we take longer. We contemplate. We strategize.” Corky and Dot chortled at this claim. Sass shoved past Clay. He dogged her steps.
In their cabin, he finally deigned to put some clothes on. “Sass, take your time. No one expects us to be waiting at the comms. For all they know, we’re asleep. Calm down. Think it through. That’s all I ask.”
Sass freed her hair to brush it, then French-braided it. She even wove the tail up and pinned it to keep the hair off her neck. Navy types took that seriously, didn’t they? Her long-ago experience of the Gannies was no help – they
shaved their skulls, men and women alike. But the commander in that video message wore a bun.
“Clay, what rank were her insignia?”
“Ah…” Clay finished fastening his pants, then reviewed the message still-life on his tablet. “That’s not a Ganny rank. And no name badge on her chest.”
“Maybe she’s a civilian.”
Sass rifled her wardrobe, and pulled out a rosy T-shirt. Its shade was a near match to the Sanctu. But faint stains had darkened in storage from suppers past.
Still holding a slinky russet sweater in his hand, Clay reached past her and selected a Mahina mushroom long-sleeved tee, high quality in a drape-y fabric. “That one. Women aren’t the only ones who think when getting dressed, you know.”
Clay was the more clothes-conscious of the couple. Her barb got to him. Score! She’d thawed the other four because she was about ready to slit his throat. All day she’d refused to rise to the bait over him going nude. “Why wear boring?”
“Pink asserts you’re a girl. A pale neutral asserts authority, and that your gender is irrelevant. More business-like. And it’s flattering on you. Don’t wear overalls.”
Sass yielded to his advice. Then she applied minimal makeup for a cool polish. She had dress-up coveralls emblazoned with the ship’s name and her own, and dithered about whether those would appear more uniform-like. But no. She was here to represent Mahina and the Aloha system, and the interests of humanity as a whole. Her Thrive overalls represented her business. He was right. She nodded assurance at herself.
“Computer,” Clay thought to ask, “did you send an acknowledgment of the hail?”
“The hail was acknowledged with the ship’s standard greeting.”
So much for Sass’s assurance. “Computer, play the ship’s standard greeting.”
Abel Greer appeared on their wall screen, a recording made a few weeks after Sass bought the ship. “Hi! I’m Abel Greer, co-owner of the skyship Thrive! Sass Collier and I are real sorry we missed your call. Please leave a message.”