Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (42 page)

I demanded to be the one to go out and get her.

I got her all the way back to the maintenance bay, her corpse limp, before it hit me.

Our first bona fide casualty.

Nobody had been naïve, about the risks. When we left Earth. All of the adults had been volunteers, and while those of us who’d been kids hadn’t necessarily understood the danger, coming of age on the
Osprey
meant becoming intimately familiar with that danger. We were totally dependent on the ship, and on each other, to keep us alive. Not a lot of margin for error. And while an interplanetary voyage of a few weeks was now as safe and routine as intercontinental airline travel had become in my great-great-grandfather’s time, traveling from star to star is brand new. Never been done. Totally without precedent.

We got Janicka’s body into a man-sized sack, sealed it up, then Chris and I both suited up and took her back outside. To the very rear of the ship, where the glow of the fusion drive lit the edges of the radiation shield and push-plate that formed an inverted twin to the mushroom-shaped bow shield at the front of the ship.

We debated who should cast Janicka into the void.

As the only person aboard who’d been intimate with her, I mumbled a few words on her behalf. Then cursed myself for not having anything more eloquent to say. Just as nobody in the planning stages had thought to consider what might happen if the people went haywire, there was nothing in the training nor the library for dealing with death.

Janicka was too stark a reminder to me that it would probably be me in that sack some day: a relic of the trip, soon to be disposed of.

Which made up my mind for me.

I told Chris we aren’t doing any space burials.

Janicka is going to stay in cold storage on the outside of the ship until we reach our new home, and then she’s going to be goddamned buried in the goddamned soil like the pioneer woman that she is.

Chris nodded his head through the clear face plate of his helmet.

He likes the idea too.

And so it is.

There’s a “graveyard” on the
Osprey
now. A graveyard for one, right down at the base of the pusher-plate where we seldom ever have to go. Janicka will be tethered there, frozen by the blackness of space, until we get to Delta Pavonis—and she can be given proper honors under a new sun.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 10,000

Ten-kay Day.

Just like any other day.

After Janicka’s death, Chris and I decided not to wake up any other adults. Not before it was his turn to go back to sleep, and the cycle would begin all over again.

Lately the kids have been pestering me about Earth.

For them, it’s been just four years.

For me … ?

I’m probably older than my parents now. Biologically, as well as emotionally.

Each year that passes, my memories of Earth become more like hardcopy photos: still possessing the same colors and shapes that they always have, but flat. Yes, flat. And so very, very far away.

I’ve started running a contest with the kids to see who can draw, each week, the most imaginative example of a possible animal we might meet when we land on our new world at Delta Pavonis. The kids have really taken the idea and run with it, too. Now all the screen savers all over the control room and, indeed, all over the ship, are filled with drawings of rampaging two-headed tyrannosaurs, unicorn snakes with rainbow wings, gargantuan proto-whales with eight flukes, and still other creatures too imaginative or even disturbing to adequately describe.

I’ve archived all of the drawings with my journal, so that anyone listening in the future can take a look. I like what the kids have done. I hope our new planet doesn’t let them down.

I think I am going to miss these kids when they go back to sleep.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 12,150

It’s time. Not only for Chris and the boys and girls—young men and women, really—to re-enter their long, quiet night of stasis, but also to turn the engine off.

We’re going to spend the next twenty years coasting. Having burned the fusion reactor for the last three decades, we’ve got three-fifths of our original fuel load left. And the math is holding steady: with two decades of free flight, we can turn the drive back on for braking, dropping gradually back down the relative velocity curve to something approaching normal interplanetary speed.

We haven’t gone that slow in many a year.

Yet, we’ve only ever reached a fraction of the ultimate velocity: the speed of light.

I’ve been thinking that if they’re going to build more ships like the
Osprey,
it’s going to be like building time capsules in each instance. Oh, we get radio messages from Earth and are more or less up to date on what’s going on, but the further we’ve traveled the more detached from home we’ve become.

Or, I should say, the more detached
I
have become.

Chris still suffers from a shade of homesickness.

I think he truly regrets coming on the trip; some days.

Which I thoroughly and completely understand.

But at this point there is only one way to go, with only one way to get there, and all anybody who is awake can do is muddle through his or her assigned tasks, make sure the broken stuff gets fixed, and hope that when we finally do touch soil again, it’s as promising and marvelous a landscape as I think all of us have unconsciously come to hope it will be.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 15,000

I don’t check in with my journal much these days.

Turning 50 means not having to say you’re sorry.

I’m the grandpa on the boat now. Or maybe an eccentric uncle?

The rotation schedule got fouled up when we had three more deaths. Extra people had to be woken up early. Now there are four bodies in the graveyard, including a child’s. Which made me quite sad. The little ones deserve to see their new home even more than the adults who started out on the trip fully-grown.

Watching a child die was about as hard as seeing Janicka die, or putting Li to sleep knowing that when she woke up again, it would probably be me who’d have passed on.

But I eat right and I use the gym and I do what I can to make sure the grim reaper stays far away. One thing about a trip like this: it’s a test case in seeing how much interstellar radiation a body can absorb before the cancers explode and take over. Even with shielding, I figure I’ve absorbed far more gamma rays than is reasonably healthy. And while the stasis beds could keep a tumor from sprouting full-bloom, my metabolism is alive and well and churning at 100%. If a metastasis chooses to present itself, I am not sure there’s a hell of a lot I can do to slow it down.

No worries.

In the past I’ve had to get dental work done. If I need to have a tumor mass of any sort removed … there are people that can be woken up for that.

What matters most right now is that we’re over halfway to Delta Pavonis. Not that you’d notice it from looking outside. Delta Pavonis is still just a star in space, like the Sun. We’re out of the Oort Cloud by a good ways, and things in interstellar space are just a whole lot of black nothing. But knowing that there’s now less time in front of us than behind us is somehow … invigorating. I don’t know. I think it’s a little like taking a long family car trip:
are we there yet? No, not yet, but soon.

Hah. Soon. Indeed.

How warped my sense of time has become, as I’ve gotten older.

The days pass much more quickly than I remember them passing when I was 25, or 15 for that matter.

I am friendly with the new crew, but not intimate.

Certainly not to the degree I’ve been with past crews.

It’s hard to relate to the kids—regardless of whether they woke up as children, or woke up as adults.

Lately I spend most of my time just wandering the ship. Passing through all the corridors and passageways, riding the IST up and down, up and down. Visiting all the familiar spaces and trying desperately to recapture that feeling I had when I was 8 years old, and everything was exciting and new.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 17,500

I’ve been accused of playing favorites.

I can live with that accusation.

So what if I rigged the wake-up schedule to my liking?

There are some people who were never going to spend any significant time awake anyway.

To prove my point I showed the plaintiff a roster of all names currently in stasis: 48 men, 49 women, 112 girls, and 83 boys. All of the adults drew lots when they volunteered to come on the trip, and all of them swore to uphold their part of the bargain, if they happened to be one of the ones assigned to an “awake” shift in support of the
Osprey.
Did it really matter if I scrubbed my parents from the next stint? Or Li, who was actually supposed to be awake
now
—for the first time, not the second.

I once read that a military general on Earth said:
no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
The trip to Delta Pavonis is a war of attrition. Fuel dwindles, supplies get used up, reserves are recycled, re-used, recycled, and re-re-used, to the point that waste must inevitably be jettisoned. Frankly I am amazed we haven’t had worse problems than we’ve already experienced.

And if a couple of untimely deaths gave me an excuse to swap a few names around on the list, who are the newbies to argue with
me
about it?

I’m old enough to be their father for Christ’s sake.

Of course, my list of names did not include the 10,000 embryos also being carried in stasis: an entire, healthy human gene pool, with plenty of room to spare.

Not that all 10,000 are expected to be implanted in wombs the instant we arrive. If the medical science is right, those embryos will be good for at least a hundred years or more, on top of the total trip time. So that as new generations of Delta Pavonians—my Lord, that is clumsy, we simply must come up with a better word for ourselves—come of age, the women can have some original offspring, and at least one or two “stasis babies” originally carried from Earth.

Inside of two centuries, if everything progresses according to the plan, there’ll be no fear of inbreeding. For anyone. And there will be so many people living on the new world that even a significantly major disaster won’t be able to wipe us all out.

Much depends on those first 25 years. When we’ll be digging in. Putting down roots. Staking our claim.

To that end I’ve been slowly and methodically constructing my arsenal of weaponry. Using the rifle designs Ben and I first finalized way back when I was in my 20s. I’ve taken them outside and test-fired the lot of them, and am satisfied that they will suffice. Unless the new planet is literally infested with bloodthirsty monsters bigger than the biggest elephant, we ought to be able to fend off whatever nasties may be lurking in those jungles and forests.

Which we still can’t see—as anything more than a green blur.

It takes hours for the telescopes to find the planet circling Delta Pavonis, and then it’s impossible to get a clear shot because of relative drift. Even when we’re getting closer and closer all the time.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 20,000

Twenty-kay day.

I’ll turn 63 soon.

In a few more years we will begin our downthrust into the gravity well of Delta Pavonis.

I’m not paying much attention to the names of the people to be woken up next. They are babies, basically, and I’ve gotten tired of changing diapers. Metaphorically-speaking.

I now spend as much time away from the youngsters as I can.

My jobs on the maintenance schedule are forgotten.

There are younger people to do all of it now. Quicker, smarter, stronger. I try to keep up with them in the gym, but it’s tough. I’m not the man I used to be. If only I could talk to my grandfather now, I know he’d understand. But he’s been dead for a long time. In fact, most of the people I knew on Earth when I was a boy, are gone. Memories only. Washed away by time and distance.

Once in awhile I still go to the medical bay and talk to Li, or my parents. Sometimes I even talk to Leah, who still looks like a young teenager. Or is it that I’ve gotten so old, everyone around me seems impossibly youthful? I can’t really say for sure. All I know is that I seem to have an easier time talking to the near-dead, than I do to the alive.

The kids think I am the strangest sort of creature: odd, annoying, occasionally funny, but also occasionally scary. One of the older crew yelled at me one day when he caught me chasing a crop of little ones down the corridor, roaring like a beast and wagging my arms and legs about: my tongue flapping, and my eyes huge.

Apparently I’d caused one of the little ones to cry!

A menace, I was.

Fuck ‘em. It’s not my fault if they don’t have a sense of humor.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 25,000

I’m old.

Old, and tired.

And they turned the goddamned gravity back on.

Not that you can “turn on” gravity. It’s just that the
Osprey
has done an about face, and we’ve been burning the engine again. Bleeding off relative velocity as we close on Delta Pavonis. It’s been a long time in coming. But I am resenting having the full weight of my body—not to mention my years—pressing down on me a little bit more each passing day.

If the math holds we should reach our target in about a dozen years.

Enough time for one more awake shift.

Joy. Another patch of snot-noses to wrangle with. This last group almost did me in. Thought they knew everything. Even the tots. It was enough to drive a man crazy.

I’ll be glad when everyone finally gets off this stinking ship.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 28,900

One of the little ones came jumping up to me today and exclaimed, “We can see home!”

Ordinarily I’d have ignored such ruckus, but I decided to humor the child and allowed myself to be lead away to the control room where the telescopes were capturing high-quality, high-resolution images of the Earth-type world which has been drawing us onward like a bulb draws moths in the summer evening.

Even with the better part of a year still in front of us, I have to admit, the view is fairly spectacular.