We talked about the prisoner, often, but we did not see it. We just kept the machines running that fed it. Made sure the doors to its tomb were closed. For all it impacted us, turn after turn, there was no living person in the ship but us.
I liked it better that way, thinking it was just the five of us, a skeleton and skeletal crew, elongated and atrophied, too long in deep space. When people talk about the frontier, about limitless darkness and an infinity of stars, what they’re talking about, really, is not the place beyond the last outpost, but the places between those lights, those ships, those hulking machines and heaps of coffined colonists abandoned by their corporations. We have seen derelicts pass, the hulking wrecks of cities. They trail dust and metal in their wake. Bits of rock and ice circle them. They are vast. They take an age to pass. Relics of that time don’t pass often. It’s always a spectacle. Perhaps even a treat, a break from the long monotony of maintenance and board games and the tick-ticking away of our once-vast food stores.
Most of the long stretches of breathing and heartbeats are taken up with routine. We are maintenance technicians, and though once, I think, I knew how to pilot, all I can remember now is the term, the conception, not the details. The ship takes care of all that, has for—how long? I’m uncertain. I can think of nothing but grease and metal.
The child, the new girl, a sixth to our happy five, was trained to this life from her birth aboard ship. She has known no other place.
The woman who made the child was Hanih, who had once been a scientist, I think. She concocted it with some hormones and the aid of a bit of frozen gel she picked up deep in the belly of the ship. Hanih had gotten bored with cloning injections, but we were short a crew member after Losain took one of the escape pods and jettisoned herself into darkness. We had only one pod left, and we weren’t going to race after her. So like all the others who went, she was replaced. This time, the replacement was a baby, not a clone. And there was another happy upside because it took less organic matter to make a small baby than a functioning clone.
Hanih did not much care for babies, it turned out, so Shai and I and the twins raised the baby. It was difficult. We didn’t know the first thing about babies. The last new, fully-formed clone we had to teach had been Shai, the clone of a dead woman, and that was more heartbeats ago than I can remember. The baby choked often, turned grayish once, and spent most of its first two turns eating and shitting, a bizarre organic body stranger than our own, if only due to its selfish desires, its shameless waste of resources.
The baby amused us, in some ways. To her, the ship was new and limitless; the ship was the world. She walked about as if she were the first traveler to ever set foot in it. She discovered the smooth tabletop we had taken out of the mess hall and propped up to block off the rest of the ship as if she had parted the jungles of a harsh, ammonia-soaked planet and found a mysterious civilization of bug-eyed humanoids on the other side. Everything amused her, and so, I think, began to amuse us. That is what babies are for. To wake the dead.
We got around to explaining some things. Shai, Hanih, me, and the twins, Jai and Pebble. We sat around on the floor silent most meals until the girl started asking questions. The first words were just repetitive. She spent weeks repeating “light” over and over again until Pebble confided that she thought the child might be simple. But she was stringing sentences together soon enough and with sentences came questions, though the worst question was never more than one word: “Why?”
Why?
I don’t know. There is a great deal no one knows. Knowing was never anyone’s function. We are here to be and do, not to question. Questions are for children, and though all the clones had asked questions, they tended to be sated when we professed to not know anything at all.
The child was not.
She asked, and we tried to answer.
“What’s my name?” she asked one day while Shai and I cleaned out the guts of the communications board. Nothing worked in it anymore, but we liked things tidy.
“Name?” I said.
“Everyone has a name but me.”
“You’re the baby,” Shai said.
“Is it because I’m not a replacement, like everyone else?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You are different. Unique. I guess we need a new name for you. What do you want it to be?”
I thought the child would choose something sensible like Pebble had, but after a few moments with her face scrunched up she stated, “Call me Owl.”
“Owl?” I said. “Do you know what an owl is?”
“No,” she said.
“And neither do I,” I said.
“But I read about them in one of the manuals?”
“You mean … the books?” Shai said, and she paused in her cleaning. “We still have some?”
“Yes,” Owl said. “They were very high up in one of the bunks in that abandoned part of the ship.”
“How did you get through there?” I asked.
“I crawled under the table,” she said.
“You should not be exploring that part of the ship,” Shai said. “It’s not for you, or for us. Our work is here. Only here.”
“But what’s in there? It looks like here, only—”
“Don’t go in there again!” Shai said, and she slammed her fist onto the console. The blow was hard enough to slice her hand. Blood dripped onto the floor.
“Let’s not get excited,” I said. “Let’s drink some hot water. Hot water is very soothing.”
I got up and went to the prep area outside the mess hall and tried the hot water tap. The water was only lukewarm now, but it would do.
Owl came after me, leaving Shia swearing at the console.
“Why was she so mad?”
“We had to leave some things in that part of the ship. Things we need to forget.”
“But why?”
“Just because, Owl. You must know, it’s just because.”
Owl grew gangly and hollow-eyed as the rest of us, growing from toddler to girl; following her growth reminded me of how much time passed, from one task to the next. I didn’t like that.
And then, one day, after she had learned to walk and shit in the recycler on her own, she asked about the prisoner.
“Who is the prisoner?”
We sat at the evening meal, legs crossed, all in a circle around the tins and crackling packages of foodstuffs.
Jai and Pebble glanced at one another. Hanih stopped eating and stood quickly, leaving us to it. Coward. Always the coward, Hanih.
Shai said, “We don’t talk about that.”
Owl threw down her freeze-dried roast beef and potatoes, half unwrapped. A waste. “Why are there so many things we don’t talk about?”
“Because it’s not necessary,” I said. “The past, and much of what happens in this ship even now, does not affect our lives. We are here for a single purpose. To serve the ship. The ship takes care of the rest.”
“That’s enough,” Shai said. “You eat that food, or I’ll eat it.”
Owl threw the packet at Shai. It hit her square in the forehead. I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. But Shai was furious. She reared up like some great wreck of a star liner and grabbed Owl by the hair and shook her.
“Don’t, hey!” I yelled, bolting up.
Jai and Pebble shrieked and pulled at Shai’s suit.
“You aren’t even necessary!” Shai said, releasing Owl and shoving her off her feet. Owl fell into the center of our discarded food packets. “You are just some poor invention of Hanih’s!”
Owl smeared the tears from her face. She snapped up a pair of scissors we used to open the food packets and bolted away, toward the door we had blocked with the table.
“Don’t, Owl!” I said, but I was too late.
Owl was small enough to slip through the barricade and into the off-limits part of the ship.
I exchanged a look with Shai.
“Fuck!” Shai said. “Help me!”
Shai took one end of the table. I took the other. But it was too heavy even for two of us. Jai and Pebble helped, and with the four of us heaving, we managed to make an opening into the corridor large enough for us to take one at a time.
“Let me go after her,” I said.
“No,” Shai said. “We all go after her. Someone needed to rein her in turns and turns ago.”
Shai ducked into the opening. I went after her. “Jai, Pebble,” I said, “Get Hanih! Tell her what’s happening.”
But I wasn’t certain that would make a difference. I worried Hanih would not care; would feel only relief.
We traveled through musty corridors, the doors to the crew quarters still half-open, kept from closing by the desiccated bodies that had tried to flee their quarters and failed. Tangles of loose wiring and cables hung from great gashes in the ceiling. The marks of fire, char and melted plastic, were everywhere.
“Owl!” I called, in part, I know, to tell her we were coming. That Shai was coming.
“There!” Shai said. “A light! She’s gotten into the prisoner’s room!”
We climbed a tacky set of ladder rungs up through the heart of the dead module and entered a great circular room filled with light.
Owl stood at the center of it, staring at the great gooey mass of bodies tangled there, suspended just over the top of the gaping mouth of the living alien beast that was our reactor, powering us through the detritus between the stars. The alien’s great tentacles kept the fleshy bodies frozen together, their torsos and limbs all melted into one another, slowly losing their elasticity and life force as the creature drained it from them.
“What is this?” Owl said, pointing not at the maw of the beast, but at the two or three faces still visible in the mass.
“That is Losain,” I said because that was the first face I recognized, but that’s not true. It was the second.
The first was my own face.
“That’s Shai!” Owl cried. “And that’s you!”
I raised my fingers and pressed them to my face. “It’s someone with my face,” I said. “But not … me.”
“You let it take you, kill you!” Owl said. “Why?”
I waved a hand about the brightly lit room, feeling … nothing. Nothing at all. “To see the stars,” I said. “There had to be sacrifices.”
“This is not being alive!” Owl cried. “You are all just wandering around, boring, dead! And this is why! You were already dead. You are the prisoner.”
Shai came toward her. “I’m afraid you’re a prisoner too, Owl.”
Owl took a step back, dangerously close to the mouth of the alien beast. Could I recall when we first found the beast? When we first made our pact, when we first agreed to give up the rest of the crew, and our own bodies? I don’t think it made it clear that while it would kill the rest of the crew, the five of us, our original selves, would remain alive forever, locked in horrified misery, gazing back at us, their clones, with glazed, terrified eyes for eternity, or however long these alien things lived.
We … they thought they were so clever. But we have seen little of the universe. Only blackness. Only the spaces between things. Because that’s where we exist. The places between.
Shai tried to grab Owl. Owl darted away, leaping over the great alien mouth. She grabbed one of its tentacles and used it to swing to the other side of the room. She landed, spry and lean as we once were, and gazed at us with such fear and hatred that for the first time in a very long while, I doubted who and what I was. I received the memory of a person who is still alive. Not one of the dead. I am not my own person.
I stared at the visage of my original. The left side of her face twitched as if in grimace or snarl or smile.
“We have given everything for this,” Shai said. “There is no going back now. We’ll lock you in here. The beast will make short work of you, too.”
“Shai,” I said. “Let’s wait for Hanih.”
“Hanih isn’t coming! She knows this child was a mistake.”
“Shai, are we still alive?”
Shai rounded on me, as I had hoped. She peered at me as if I were some stranger. “What are you even saying? We chose this!”
“I don’t feel alive. Do you?”
“We are the ship! We maintain the ship! We are doing God’s glorious work, exploring his—”
Owl swung past the amalgamation of bodies and came up behind Shai, scissors in hand.
Shai turned just as she did, and caught her by the wrist. “You—”
I shoved Shai, hard. Shai screamed and fell back into the maw of the beast. A great wave of heat engulfed us. The beast roared. Shai’s body sank into the thing’s mouth up to the waist, and her skin began to bubble, the flesh sloughing off like wet clay. She still had hold of Owl’s wrist, dragging the girl after her.
I yanked Owl free. Owl rolled over—
—and stabbed me in the shoulder with the scissors. She screamed and bolted up and out of the room as the alien thing burned through Shai’s body, filling the module with the smell of cooking flesh.
Now I hobble through the dark, abandoned corridors of the ship, blood drip-dripping from my shoulder. Hanih has not come looking for us, nor have Jai or Pebble. I know they are performing our duties, instead, nurturing the ship to ensure it is hale enough to take us to … wherever this alien thing is taking us.
I slip a bit in my blood and brace myself against one charred wall. “Owl?” I whisper, and I wonder how long it will take this wound to get infected, how long I can wander these gutted wards, this mausoleum to our hubris. Forever, maybe. Out here, there is nothing but forever.
I hear scuttling in the vents above, and I hold my breath. I know she is here, somewhere, hiding in the spaces between things. I will find her, I know, because I, too, have hidden in the dark places between the stars. I have gazed there so long, I have seen what looks back.
“Where are you going? There’s nowhere to go, Owl.”
“I am going toward the light,” she says.
I am tired, so very tired. I sink to the floor to take a bit of a rest. Just a few moments. There’s no light, I know, because I have been all through this ship, and we are the best and worst of what’s in it. I press my hand to my wound and try to remember what the sun felt like. I imagine it bathing my face, warming my skin.
I open my eyes. Darkness.
How can she see light?
I should get up. I should go back. Leave Owl and Shai and call up new clones to replace them, clones who ask fewer questions, who explore fewer paths. We should just keep doing this, again, and again, as we have always done.
How can she see light?
Something flashes at the corner of my eye. I peer down the corridor. There’s a door there, something glittering, gleaming, just beneath it. Have I ever been through that door? I cannot recall.
I heave myself to my feet. I take a few tentative steps. There’s a promise there, in that flickering light. The promise of a destination, not just a hollow existence, but … life.
“This way,” Owl says.
I follow the sound of her voice.
I follow.