6

 

April 30, 2052 (Launch plus 101 days), 16:14 GMT.

 

The waterfall thunders beside me, thousands of gallons of water crashing to the rainforest pool before beginning its journey through the savannah and mangrove swamp to the ocean. It’s humid, sticky, low-wind here in Ring Two. I’m sopping wet, not from the spray of the waterfall, but because I’m sweating like a pig. The ceiling, at 120 feet, towers above the canopy. In ten years, the trees will be brushing the ceiling. Now, the biome is filled with light and mist swirling from the waterfall.

I pull yards of vine from the trees at the edge of the waterfall. The vines grow like crazy here, not only clogging the water aeration system, but threatening to pull the immature trees to the ground. I stuff the vines into three bot-barrows, and they wheel off to dump their load where the organic material will be recycled into soil. You take care of the farm…

A blue-tongued skink saunters down the path and then darts into the ground cover. To my left, orchids bloom from their niches in an exotic hardwood. I replace a sensor in the humidity monitoring system and SINDAS commends me for bringing it back online.

I know I should call Houston; SINDAS reminds me with regularity that they are demanding information. I don’t want to deal with it.

Before leaving the rainforest, I walk down the graveled path under a stand of coffee trees. In the corner farthest from the waterfall, I reach the tropical garden. I hear a myriad of insects squeaking and calling. I keep a lookout for one of my favorite exotics, a tropical leptodactylid frog with one-of-a-kind toes. The little gems are too timid for me to catch a glimpse of one.

I reach the tropical gardens and enjoy the fragrance of the citrus trees. Immature limes, lemons, tangerines, and oranges dangle on the branches. There’s a pair of dwarf complete protein breadfruit trees laden with fruit. I scowl at them. I’ll eat the fruit, which that ruthless swamp spawn Jepler provided, but I don’t have to like it.

The air steams with humidity, and my skin soaks up the rays from the solar floods. I know it’s not real sunlight, but I can almost feel my skin churning out Vitamin D. I make a mental note to ask SINDAS if I need sunscreen. Wouldn’t that be a bright spot, to get skin cancer on the Galileo?

Biosphere 2 didn’t include honey bees. Its glass panels filtered out the UV light that bees need to navigate. Beta Ring experiments developed a way to keep bees alive. Now all the rings have special solar-floods that shine in UV wavelengths. The UV’s light up in progression, mimicking the sun’s travel across the sky so the bees can find their way from hive to flower and back. The rings also include progressions of flowering plants so the bees always have a source of pollen. Here in the rainforest, they do their bit, pollinating the citrus trees, figs, papaya, oranges, star fruit, and tropical apple.

I sit on a resin bench. The pups come bouncing over, jump up in my lap, slather me with licks, and curl up beside me on the bench.

“You two would have been great company when I walked from Charleston to Houston. The sky was so wide overhead. Wind blew. I watched clouds forming. You could smell rain coming.” Here in the rings, even when the sprinklers are watering from above, there’s no smell of rain.

“On my first day out of Charleston, I passed a grove of dogwood trees huddled at the edge of a forest. Brilliant scarlet seeds hung from the branches, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, ripe with life. Something drew me to those seeds, like an invisible hand pointing me toward them. I slipped my pack from my shoulder and propped it up against a road sign. Then I walked back to the grove and picked twenty-seven seeds. It felt good, picking those seeds, like I was part of the earth. I’d planted crops, tended gardens, grafted trees, but this was different. All that day, as I hiked under the vast blue sky, a vibrancy, a quickening presence more vast than the living earth walked with me.

“At the end of the day, I scattered the seeds at the edge of a woods and along a grassy meadow. As I watched them fall to the ground, I felt like I was a partner in the fertile, throbbing life of creation. I felt the warmth of the sun and took in the rich scent of the air. Something in me changed because I was leaving seeds behind. I was marking a trail.

“From South Carolina across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and into Texas, I gathered and scattered seeds: pecans, hickory nuts, dogwood, maple, beech, sassafras, oak, hard seeds and round seeds, misshapen seeds and smooth seeds, all of them packed with life.

“In my neighborhood in Houston, a few oaks and pines braved the yards outside homes. The fruit seeds I’d collected kept me connected to the trip, to that incomprehensible presence and vigor of life that accompanied me on the road. Every seed I held was a little miracle storehouse, expectant, waiting. Two or three times a year, I would take a weekend hike out to the empty land around the city. One time, I found a place to plant cherry pits. Another day, I found a south-facing hillside that was perfect for peaches. So I dug thirty-eight holes with my trowel and planted them.

“Marsha loved to come with me on those weekend hikes. She has that great smile. When she talks, her hands dance like graceful 6s. She has a soft voice, but when she’s speaking about something she cares about, her voice gets passionate. She cares about growing things. She sees the mystery, the wonder of life. Even when I’m quiet, she’s listening to me, as if she tunes into a part of me that doesn’t have words. We had a connection, an understanding that I’d never had with another person.”

I shove thoughts of her away. They remind me I’m the only human here.

 

****

 

May 1, 2052 (Launch plus 102 days), 03:49 GMT.

I’m walking to Houston, four days out of Charleston, hiking past cotton fields with brown, withered plants. The sun blazes in the expanse of blue sky. It’s so far overhead that it stretches you; it pulls your mind saying, “Chase me, reach up and touch me.” I stop for a moment, watching jet contrails fade to distant smears across the sky. I turn, studying the brown fields, the flat landscape, the heat rising from the road up into the far sky.

When I look to the road to resume my journey, I don’t know which way is north. My heart races. I start to sweat. North is gone; there’s no direction. I want to run, but I don’t know which way. I try to lift my foot, but it feels stuck, as if the pavement has melted and grabbed it. I can’t tell which is the road before me and which is the road I’ve already traveled.

All my life I’ve known which way is north. Now there’s no north, no way to know where I am or where I’m going. I turn and turn and turn, looking, waiting to see if this feels like north. It’s gone: like a fly dodging the swatter, like a fox slipping into the underbrush. The ground shudders. It shakes me and I fall to the hard pavement. Overhead, the sky is shrinking, closing in, collapsing on me. I don’t know which way to go to Houston. If I don’t hurry, the sky will shrink and pin me to the pavement. I struggle to my feet. I’m thirsty. I think about the seeds in my pocket and pull them out. They crumble into dust. I cry out in my sleep.

I wake, cold and trembling.

I stumble from my hammock and out of the lean-to. Ginger and Mouser scramble along with me, barking, yipping, waking the goats for a middle-of-the-night party. I look at the curve in the distance, right, then left. Nothing. I face the near wall, the far wall. Nothing. I look overhead to the lights and lattice, then down at the dirt and gravel-covered ground. Nothing. There is no north. There’s no way home.

 

****

 

06:17 GMT.

I come to on the ground. Ginger’s licking my face. I pull myself up to a sitting position. Ginger dances around me and then curls up in my lap. Mouser bounces over and licks my hand as if I’m addictive. Then he rolls over, arching his belly at me, and I stroke him.

For crying out loud. Whoever’s inside me, flipping that relay, why don’t you go somewhere else and play? There’s really no sense in having me black. It’s not going to change things.

I have to call Houston. They have no idea what’s happening. But what is happening? I’ve learned to enter the ocean biome and keep my eyes on the sand, never looking at the curving walls of water. I hate it, but I can go in and do the work that needs to be done. I’ve regulated ocean pH, caught crabs, checked the health of the coral. In the mangrove biome, I’ve counted terrapins to determine the health of the swamp, knowing with every splosh of my foot in the muck that I’m in FarSpace Ship Galileo, traveling at .93 Planck speed, moving farther away from Earth, with nothing under me, nothing holding me up.

No one has ever done this before. How can I figure out what’s happening?

I take a deep breath and look around me. From their shed, goats gaze at me curiously. I see a goldfinch swooping above the orchard. At the mint patch across the path, bees buzz around the tiny purple flowers. A fat toad hops out of the peanut patch, crosses the gravel, and wriggles into the strawberry bed.

I look down at the pups. “I wish they’d made her voice more mechanical and less human. I hear her, and I look for a person. But there’s no person, just that voice coming out of the speakers. After the jolt of looking for a person, I remember there’s no one else here, and I find myself thinking about people on Earth, what their voices were like: that confounded Jepler’s musical sales pitch; Dr. H’s calm, steady tenor, Marsha’s bubbling laughter. I remember what it was like to shake hands and feel a man’s sturdy grip. Jepler had rough skin on his hands, chapped and red. Dr. H had tanned leathery hands, as if he mended pasture fences for a hobby. Marsha had smooth hands. They were warm with life, the life I feel when I feel my pulse.

“You do that for me, pups. Ginger, when you sit in my lap, Mouser, when I stroke you, it drives the cold wind away; it brings me down out of the tree and back onto the ground.”

 

****

 

13:30 GMT.

I’m in the Tri-Comm, sitting before the empty holo-vid screen and the three bank instrument panels of the ship-to-Earth communication board. I flip the switches for transmission. I leave the holo-vid switch off. I don’t want to see anyone from Earth. Maybe I don’t want them to see me. Most of all, I don’t want to see Earth. I don’t know what it would do to me. Ginger nuzzles my hand and then curls up beside Mouser on the cushioned seat next to mine.

The circuit lights blink orange, then flare green. I lean toward the microphone. “Houston, this is Grant Chapman.”

“Dr. Chapman, thank goodness! This is Tyler Ferris. We’ve got to tell Dr. Hudson right away. He’s been hounding us about you.”

Behind me, the network operations comm fills twelve banks of instrument panels. Lights glow, wink, dim, and flash, like a demented Christmas tree.

Lines from the NOC manual buzz through my mind: “The Galileo life support systems are fully integrated. Yet each ring has the capacity for autonomous operation if required. All control, maintenance, data, environmental regulation, safety, inter-ship communication and sensor systems are unified on the same structured cabling networks and ship-wide fiber optic backbone, arranged in loop and radial configuration to allow redundancy in network connections.”

“How are you doing, Dr. Chapman?” Ferris’s voice jars me.

“Ask me something I know how to answer.”

His voice becomes business-like. “Status report.”

“Ferris, I didn’t mean to snap at you. Status report: no level-one emergencies.” I’m weary and numbers desert me. I give Ferris the bottom line. “Everything else will come out in the wash.”

Ferris hesitates. “Are you, I mean…I don’t know how to ask this. Are you the only one alive?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Chapman.”

“They kept me alive, Ferris. If it hadn’t been for them, I would have died.” After that, there’s nothing to say.

I hear a sound in the background from Earth, as if someone scribbled on a pad of paper and shoved it across the desk to Ferris. “Can you get Dremenev’s enhanced pulse comm back online?” His voice sounds rigid and forced.

“I don’t know much about that sort of thing.”

“We can’t send data on this limited system. Dremenev left instructions. We have them recorded; we’ll play them back to you. He was too weak, at the end, to do the work, but I don’t think you’ll have a hard time. It’s mostly putting components in place and hooking up a few connections. You passed soldering, didn’t you?”

“Ferris, the last time I soldered anything was in high school tech class.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle, Dr. Chapman.”

“I never rode a bicycle.”

“You science types lead interesting lives.”

I don’t want to lead an interesting life. I want to be back home on Earth.

“Dr. Chapman, we’ll get you back,” Ferris says, as if he’s reading my mind.

“What?”

“The team’s been working on the best ways to turn the Galileo around and bring you home. The president said there’s been enough senseless waste of life. We’re to save you at all costs.”

I think about Carmen’s bassoon. Those seven nauts had the courage and vision to go to space and it’s a senseless waste of life?

I hear voices in the background and then Ferris speaks again. “We really need Dremenev’s pulse comm hooked up. This system works fine for voice, but we can’t get data from SINDAS without the enhanced pulse comm. Then we can take control of Galileo’s systems. After that, it’s the old story about turning an aircraft carrier. We’ll get you back.”

Ferris lowers his voice. “You were good friends with Dr. Jepler. I’m not supposed to tell you, but he was fired from NASA. They’ve served a restraining order; he can’t contact any of us. Our jobs are on the line if we talk to him. He punched out two of the president’s advisors…”

My first thought is Jepler, you carrion eater, you deserve it. One of your shady deals finally bit you. I imagine it was one of Jepler’s swindles in the joining bolt fiasco. When they were building the Galileo, a twenty-five-pound joining bolt sheared off, and we almost lost Ring Two. NASA needed to check all the bolts holding Ring Two together. The executives at Armalla Steel said, “Bring the bolts back to Earth and we’ll run them through the holo-scan.”

We couldn’t tell if their executive brains were powered by monkey drool or if that was their way of saying this topped their priority list for the year the flaming netherworld froze over. Bringing the bolts back to Earth meant disassembling the skeleton of Ring Two. No one wanted to do that. On the other hand, no one wanted to send the rings into space with bolts ready to shear off.

Enter Wild Bill. In the grip of his trade fixation, he’d crafted a sterling set of deals, cons, and reciprocal agreements. He “borrowed” a one-and-a-half-ton advanced holo-scan from Maryland Comprehensive Technical Institute in Baltimore to send to space. MCTI’s reputation had been trashed six months earlier when the CFO fled the country with a luscious-looking comptroller and a seven-million-dollar endowment fund. The publicity from MCTI’s gift of the holo-scan not only boosted the school’s reputation but somehow brought in a twelve-million-dollar endowment.

Bahnwerk Space Research Inc., happened to have a space launch scheduled. It happened to have free space in the cargo bay which they were glad to donate. The crew happened to include four experienced holo-scan operators who just happened to have free time once they reached space. They wrestled the holo-scan around outside the ring. Seventeen hundred fifty bolts were inspected. Nineteen defective ones were replaced. In Houston, NASA celebrated—both that the mission hadn’t been shut down and also that we’d avoided the worst disaster since the O-rings failed on the Challenger back in 1989.

No one ever knew all the deals Billy wrangled to get this done, but one night over roasted breadfruit seeds and bittersweet mocha-nut toffee froth in his apartment, he told me Bahnwerk Space Research had received ten years’ worth of NASA contracts. And he mentioned that the statute of limitations would run out in seven years.

I’ll tell you something, Jepler. I’m glad you’re not at NASA. The statute of limitations for what you did to me will never run out.

Suddenly, for no reason I can see, I’m so sad I’m near tears. Clouds of gray 59s leak from the sky and slide through my heart.

“We’ll get you home, Dr. Chapman.” Ferris’s words scare the numbers away. Suddenly, I’m hungry for home, for the feeling of wind in my face, for a chance to see the sun rise and to watch storm clouds boil across the sky. I want to see Marsha coming toward me and hear her singing and feel the soft touch of her hand.

Ginger and Mouser look up at me with luminous, mournful eyes. I know what they’re thinking: they don’t want to return. They spring to their feet with a buzzing growl in their throats, as if I’m shoving them in a cage.

I hear muted voices from the comm. After a moment, Ferris says, “Are you sure you don’t want to start on the pulse comm right now?”

“Ferris, I’ll call tomorrow. And here’s what I want: Dr. Jepler and Dr. Hudson at Mission Control, ready to talk to me. If they’re not there, no data will get back home. Do you have that, Ferris?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ferris, tell your wife her peach cobbler is still the best I’ve ever tasted.”

“Thanks, sir.”

“Talk to you tomorrow.”

I punch the switch to end voice transmission and wish I had something to throw against the wall. Mouser jumps to the floor and barks.

“I know you’re not happy with me. Let’s go for a walk.” Ginger joins Mouser, barking angrily. “I don’t care if you don’t like what I’m doing. You’re not in charge.

“We’re going to milk the goats. You can watch me put water on to boil for rice and beans and scramble up eggs and onions. For dessert, I’ll have a banana smoothie with goat milk yogurt and cinnamon.” We head out, down the gray-tiled corridor for the Ring One ag biome. “And after supper, our evening’s entertainment will be figuring out what to say to the president.”