Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (4 page)

It was easy, since everything I needed to know was in Howard's databanks. And it helped pass the time, keeping my mind off things I still didn't want to think about. Mama and Papa and Irenka were still there, like deep sores newly scabbed over. But somehow, day by day, Tab and I grew closer. And the hurt got a little bit less, and a little bit easier to carry.

She and I manipulated the observatory's sensors and equipment, cataloguing various large and small objects in their path.

Tab told me that, contrary to popular conception of centuries past, deep space was not a total void. The Kuiper and Oort regions were actually a combined debris field that bled inexorably into the sparser debris that populated the interstellar medium—where the planemos ruled.

Planemos. Planets without stars. Worlds unto themselves.

Perhaps the Outbound had ultimately reached and settled on one of them? After a voyage spanning centuries?

Howard diverted our course on several occasions in order to investigate anomalies that showed up on the observatory's impressive sensor array.

In each case, we found nothing, even if the comets and icy worldlets themselves were interesting.

Mostly, they were rocky bodies that had accrued a shell of water and gas ice. Perfectly routine, once you got out beyond Pluto.

On only one of these did we find something that indicated humanity.

It was a smallish snowball of a world, irregularly shaped, yet giving off radioactive emissions from one of its many craters.

Closer inspection with the telescopes revealed signs of mining, long since abandoned.

It was enough to make Tab whoop and spin, shaking her hips side to side while she floated through the observatory's control center and Howard jabbered with as much excitement as his computer-cooled mentality could muster.

We matched with the ice body and Tab and I went outside in one of the observatory's two dories. Landing, we then took suits—one of which I'd helped Tab extensively modify to fit me—and we were disappointed to find only ice-crusted garbage and a small pile of spent fissile material.

No messages. No clue to how long the Outbound had stayed, or where they had gone.

There was no sign of Pioneer 10 either.

We returned to the search.

Twice more in two years, we found similar pit-stops on similar worlds. The Outbound had needed hydrogen isotopes and reaction mass for their fusion drives. It must have taken them many decades to travel as far as we had gone in just a few years on antimatter drive.

Tab risked active communications, tight-beamed to the fore.

For weeks we waited for a reply, and nothing came.

The longing to see other living humans became like an itch to me. Beyond missing my family, I also missed the wide open plazas and parks of home, where I'd been able to race my electric chair between the fountains and startle the pigeons and laugh like a boy ought to laugh.

At ship's night, I began dreaming of home, and . . . other things. It was embarrassing to talk about with Tab. I had an easier time talking about it with Howard, who had been a man once, and before that, a teenaged boy.

Howard said he was surprised that I was getting the kind of physical response I was getting, even though I had never felt anything below my hip bones my entire life. When our conversations turned specifically to women and women's bodies, Howard hesitantly uncorked a database of pictures he'd been keeping—pictures that my mother would have been scandalized by, had she caught me looking at them on my laptop back at home.

"Don't tell Tab," Howard had warned in a fraternal fashion. "She's liable to erase me if she finds out I've shown you this."

I promised Howard I would not tell, and was actually grateful to have something I could share with another male, even if he was just a computer recording. We talked more and more, Howard and I, while Tab and I remained close, if gradually more separate. One evening when Tab thought I was asleep, I slipped out of bed and moved silently through the air to the doorway to her room, where I heard her and Howard talking. Pillow talk, my mother would have called it, made strange by the fact that Howard was not actually in the bed with his wife.

"He's going to be a man soon," Tab said sadly.

"He became a man when his daddy died," Howard replied.

"Probably true. But you don't know how happy I've been, finally having a young one around to look after. We tried so hard, all those years, you and I. And nothing. Then, like Sarah, God sends me this boy in my old age. Only I never got to have him as a baby. He was mostly grown up when he came, and now . . ."

I felt a lump form in my throat while Tab quietly wept.

"He's a good boy, Tabitha. We can both see that. And I think he loves you. He won't say it when I talk with him, but I can feel it."

Tab barked out a mocking laugh. "Hah! A computerized man who can feel!"

"You know what I mean, woman. Now hush up. My sensors tell me the boy is lurking at your door. He's probably heard everything we've been saying."

"Sorry," I said, letting myself in, sheepishly smiling.

Tab was there, wiping tears from her eyes. "Don't be, Mirek. I'm just a sad old lady who never had a chance to have any children of her own. Don't mind it if I've become too attached to you."

In fact, I didn't mind it. I didn't mind it at all.

Using my arms, I launched from the hatch and grabbed Tab in a bear hug, squeezing her as tightly as I remembered her having squeezed me that first day I decided to stay with my new family and seek the Outbound.

She wept anew, for joy this time, and I told Tabitha and Howard Marshall how much I did love them, and how thankful I was that they'd found me and given me a home when the world had taken all such things from me.

By the time I was sixteen, I suspected that the full burden of humanity's self-annihilation had yet to settle on my shoulders. Some crucial part of me remained numb to the idea that everyone had ceased to exist, and that all the artifacts of humanity on virtually every world had been antimattered to dust. How ironic that perhaps the only surviving tokens of human intelligence were the final remaining warbots that continued to prowl the solar system, seeking targets and enemies that did not exist. Such thoughts were depressing, and depression again became a common companion.

I'd have liked very much to have a young woman around to talk to, to touch, and to hold in my arms at night. But the way things stood, I might not ever see another woman again, besides Tabitha, and this grew to be an irritant like no other.

With Howard's surreptitious help, I began to distill spirits from the grains grown in the farm domes.

Shortly after, Howard began to worry that he had an alcoholic on his hands.

But how else was I supposed to bear it? I had a dead past and an unknown future. The only living young man left in the universe!

Homesickness and abstract horniness accentuated my depression, giving it a melancholy flavor.

I began to drink daily. Alone. In the private module I'd built out on the face of the observatory's foundation, where Tab couldn't touch or talk to me. I neglected my daily exercise in the spin room. Why bother? What future awaited me now? I'd been young when I left Earth, and young I would remain for many years. But what was youth without joy? Without a girlfriend? I found myself daydreaming endlessly about all the older girls I had ever been attracted to: their faces, their expressions, the way they laughed or got angry, how their bodies had moved under their clothes. It got so that I thought I would be ecstatic to see even a single, other breathing female, regardless of her state. Just someone I could hug and who could hug me back, and who wasn't old enough to be my grandma.

I grew distant from Howard and Tabitha both.

I got sick of them, and I think they began to grow sick of me.

We began to go days or even weeks not speaking to each other, and eventually I retreated to the privacy module almost entirely, forcing Howard to monitor and tend to the observatory all by himself, with Tabitha's declining help.

Which was fine, at first, because Howard had always done most everything anyway.

Then, one day, there came a beacon.

It was faint. No more than a weak radio signal, sending binary.

Howard couldn't make sense of the message, which seemed truly random—ones and zeroes in an endless stream, without pattern.

That was okay. It was a sign that we were still on the right path. It was also enough to shock me into a forced detox.

By the time we reached the comet from which the transponder was sending, I was sober enough to take out a dory, and human enough to actually be pleasant to Tab for the first time in too long.

On the surface of the comet, I found a tunnel.

At the bottom of the tunnel, I found a grave: sixty-eight bodies, all perfectly frozen, and arranged with dignity.

I spent days examining the site for anything that might indicate where the other survivors had gone. They were of mixed racial heritage and gender, and if I'd had to guess, I'd have said they were Americans. Whether or not they came from the group of Outbounders that we'd been specifically pursuing was uncertain, but their presence was the first absolute proof that humanity had survived to that point, so far from its now-dead home.

And that was enough. I reverently went among the dead, recording their names from the steel tags attached to their bodies and taking digital pictures.

When I ultimately got back to the observatory, I was calm.

Almost too calm for Tab's taste.

But the dead of the Outbound had helped me cross a threshold I hadn't known needed crossing, and at once filled me with renewed resolve.

Quickly, I flushed out the privacy module and dumped every last drop of grain alcohol.

Next, I began an exhaustive catch-up on all my neglected duties, interspersed with profound and heartfelt apologies to Tab and Howard alike. I couldn't tell whether or not the man inside the computer could feel pain, but I knew my behavior over the last few months had scared and hurt Tab. Certainly I'd treated them both badly enough. I hoped that I could make it up to them, given time. And they certainly seemed grateful and relieved to see my renewed sense of purpose.

"Forgive?" I finally said one day, when the observatory was back in order and Tab and I were sharing a meal for the first time in ages.

A very long silence.

"Forgiven," Tab said, slightly smiling so that the corners of her eyes wrinkled warmly. She reached out a shaking, gnarled hand, and I took it gratefully, squeezing.

During the tenth year of our flight, we found the first ship. It was abandoned. Ransacked. Every last usable part taken. A skeleton of a vessel, accompanied by another mass grave.

At year fourteen, we found three more ships, also stripped, and also serving as a memorial to more people who had apparently lost—or given—their lives for the cause.

This time, I also found children, each far too young to have been born on Earth. The sight of those little ones brought up disturbing memories. They reminded me far too much of Irenka.

For Tab, who had become so old that she never left the observatory anymore, the children were actually a sign of providence.

"The day God takes away our ability to make babies, that's the day when we know we're truly cut off from His grace."

I pondered Tab's words and watched her gently maneuver through the kitchen, wrapped tightly against a chill in the air that did not exist. She'd tried over the years to bring me to Christ. Oh yes, she'd tried. Especially when I came off my bender with the grain alcohol. But somehow, I just never found the spark. I heard the words and I grudgingly listened when she read scripture, but while I respected and even admired the old woman's faith, I could not feel it likewise.

Where Tab felt certainty in God's purpose, I felt . . . nothing. In my teens I'd often questioned myself on this, suspecting some kind of internal moral failure. But now I just resigned myself to the fact that I was too much like my parents—unable to set aside the rational long enough embrace the fire and "get religion."

As so often happened when Tab and I failed to see eye to eye, I discussed it with Howard, who had always seemed to support his wife's belief without necessarily going great-guns himself.

"Tab's pops was a pastor," Howard said one night when he and I were having a quiet conversation in the observatory's control center. "God was mighty in her family, from the father down to the youngest child. It was kind of scary, when we first got together. She'd drag me off to meetings and bible study and I went along with it because my moms had read me bible too, and it didn't bother me any. And Tabby, well . . . She was just so damned attractive, I think I'd have walked into a pool of piranha if it meant I got to sit next to her and hold her hand.

"She was furious with me when she found out about you learning to distill. Almost as furious as when she found out about the pictures from the men's e-zines."

"Tab found out about that?" I said, laughing. "I swear, I didn't tell!"

"I know, son. It was me. I never could keep a secret from that woman, not in my entire life."

We shared laughter, one old man and one young man.

I sighed, and was silent for a long time.

"Howard, do you think I'll ever get to have a wife?"

The speakers were quiet. Pondering.

"If we can ever find these Outbounders we're on the trail of, I'd say, yes. Absolutely. Girl'd be plum crazy not to get with a handsome young guy like you."

"But I'm still a paraplegic."

"True. But let me tell you something: for women, a man being tall and macho ain't the end-all, be-all. Especially the older a woman gets, and the longer she goes learning how hard it is to find a decent man, she appreciates the good ones when they come along. Don't worry about it, son. Your woman is out there."

"But what if I can't make her—"

"Let that part of it take care of itself, son. Don't fret over it now, especially when we ain't even found these folk yet. You hear me?"

"Yessir," I said, clamping up on the subject, even if it remained heavily on my mind.