Read Mission: Tomorrow - eARC Online
Authors: Bryan Thomas Schmidt
I watched the curve of the Earth slide up, down, and just enough from side to side to make me nervous. I could deal with one axis of rotation and a little wobble, but too much more and I wouldn’t be able to eyeball it.
And so I passed the longest twenty-three seconds of my life, tapping my thruster controls while a plasma fire roared behind me and the Earth bobbed up and down in front of me. The view might have been beautiful. I didn’t notice.
All I could think was,
I will never again tell my son he plays too many video games
.
When the burn stopped, it was so abrupt—from noise to silence, without any sputtering or fading—and I was so focused that it took me a second to realize what had happened. Then the radio came back, and I nearly wept.
“—are you there?” Roger’s voice was tight and flat, as if he’d been repeating himself over and over. “Kenna, this is Gladstone, please respond—”
“I’m here!” I said, blinking away tears. “I’m still here.”
I heard him exhale. “We lost you for a minute,” he said. “What happened?”
I told him about the plasma fire, the EM interference, and my seat-of-the-pants maneuvering against the misfiring rocket. “Am I still on course?” I asked.
“Affirmative,” Roger said after a long pause.
“Would you tell me if I wasn’t?”
“Absolutely,” he said, too quickly this time.
I decided I didn’t really want to know. “Okay. I’m moving to the other end of the pod now.”
“Copy that.”
I stood up on the cargo pod, walked across its length, and leaned over the door to inspect my rocket nozzle. Amazingly, despite a large crack down one side and charring all around, the bell was still intact. I took a picture and resolved to only buy space equipment from that manufacturer for as long as I lived.
I pulled myself upright again and bent my knees. Then I de-magnetized my boots and kicked off as hard as I could, jettisoning my used pod-rocket stage.
I had one final maneuver left. Only one more thing that could possibly go wrong—or so I thought.
“You’re sure the train’s holding position?” I asked Roger.
“We issued the remote command as soon as your pod separated,” he said. “It took some distance for the emergency brakes to decelerate the vehicle to a complete stop, but it shouldn’t be more than a few kilometers above where you’re going to hit the ribbon. Within range of your suit jets, in any case. Your Ops must still be unconscious; he hasn’t responded to any radio hails.”
“And what happens if he wakes up and decides he needs to continue the ascent?”
“We overrode the drive controls and added a password lock. The vehicle’s not going anywhere until you get back aboard.”
“How’d you clear
that
with Legal?”
There was a pause. “We . . . haven’t exactly told them what we’re doing. It’ll take them a couple of hours to figure it out, and longer than that to get a security team out here.”
I felt a lump in my throat. “Thank you, Roger.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “Let’s see if this crazy stunt works first. Two hundred seconds.”
I cleared my throat. “Thank you for trying.”
“Hey,” Roger said, “I’ve been on this control desk for four years. You’re the first ostech who’s ever asked me what my name is. That’s something.”
“My husband’s a lawyer,” I said. “Whatever the company does to you and your team after this, he’ll represent you.”
“Aw, hell, you’re married?” Roger said. “
Now
you tell me.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I’m a wrinkled old lady. Did I not mention that?”
Roger chuckled. “You got kids?”
“We have a son.” I saw Travis’ face in my mind: smiling, crying, sleeping.
“Well, you’ll have one heck of a bedtime story to tell him in a couple weeks,” Roger said.
“Yeah.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Listen, if I don’t make it, I want you to tell my family something.”
“Your signal’s breaking up, Kenna,” Roger said.
“I said, if I don’t make it, I want you to give a message to my family.”
“Do not copy, Kenna,” Roger said, “and if you keep talking that way, I’m not going to listen.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Don’t be a dick, Gladstone.”
“No, ma’am, I’m not feeling sick at all,” he said. “One hundred seconds to target. Are you ready?”
I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked my equipment. My right glove held a coiled work cable with my multitool tied to one end and the other end secured around my waist. My left glove rested on my suit’s rescue paddle. “Good to go.”
“Target in thirty seconds,” Roger said, his voice cool and calm again. “Prepare for capture on your starboard, repeat, starboard side.”
“Copy that,” I said. “Thirty seconds, starboard side.” Timing was going to be everything here. I could barely see the silver line that was the EL ribbon, twinkling ahead of me like a single strand of a spider’s web.
Roger counted me down from fifteen.
When he reached “zero,” I swung my right arm as hard as I could and threw out the cable. At the same time, I squeezed the rescue paddle to deploy my suit’s crash gear. A series of airbags inflated all around me, and tiny reservoirs at the edges of my backpack burst open and sprayed quick-setting polyfoam to fill the gaps between the airbags.
Everything after that was, as they say, in Sir Isaac Newton’s hands.
The EL was a momentary grey blur as I flew past. But I had flung my cable across to the far side of the ribbon, and when those perpendicular lines collided, the weights on either side of the work cable—my spacesuited self and my heavy multi-tool—swung out of their forward trajectories and into rapidly decaying orbits around the ribbon.
I had played out the entire length of my work cable, but my relative speed was so great that the whole cable wrapped around the ribbon in a matter of seconds. I didn’t even have time to become nauseated. I felt three things in rapid succession: a gentle tug when the cable first hit the ribbon; a sharp lurch when the multi-tool ballast smacked into the ribbon, anchoring that end; and a skull-jarring crash when I collided with the ribbon, transferring all my velocity into it.
My ears were still ringing when I regained my senses, and it took me a moment to orient myself. All but two of my airbags had burst, and most of the polyfoam had been smashed into a white haze all around me. I waved away the debris until I could look up and down the EL.
It’s mind-boggling to witness something that big actually
moving
. I saw waves traveling along the ribbon, moving downward and making the carbon nanotube shimmer in the lower atmosphere, then racing upward to shake the stopped train. I wondered if that would finally wake up Nick. I also wondered how many alarms were going off in all the various EL control centers right now.
Yeah
, I thought, watching the ripples propagate and interfere with each other,
that’s definitely coming out of your paycheck.
I popped my ears and realized the buzzing noise I’d been hearing was actually Roger talking to me.
“Sierra, Gladstone, please respond, over.” He sounded more than a little frantic. “Sierra, this is Gladstone, come in, over. Dammit!”
“I’m here!” I said, hardly believing it. “Gladstone, Sierra, I am going to get you an ancient bottle of single malt and the best legal defense in the Solar System!”
“That’s great,” Roger said. I heard shuffling noises in the background. “Listen, we’ve got some visitors here, but you are go for ascent. If you need help, ask your favorite aunt. I repeat, if you need help—”
The line went dead. I checked to make sure my suit radio was working, but I suspected I knew what had happened.
It hadn’t taken Legal quite as long as Roger had hoped to get wise to his shenanigans, and they’d sent a team to shut down Gladstone Control. Security wasn’t going to listen to a bunch of flight engineers explain why they needed to crash a human being into the EL. They were going to lock down that tiny tracking station in the wilds of Oregon and make sure they didn’t have some kind of terrorist cell going on there.
Six different disasters in one day. I briefly wondered if that was some kind of record, then got back to work.
As my un-safed RCS thrusters pushed me upward, rattling my teeth, I wondered what Roger had meant by asking my favorite aunt for help.
It took me the better part of an hour to fly back up the ribbon to the train. My retro burn had cost me a lot of altitude. Then it took another fifteen minutes to climb around the power receiver panels to the crew compartment.
Miraculously, Nick was awake by then, and he opened the airlock for me. Stale recycled air had never smelled so sweet.
A moaning sound greeted me when I pulled off my helmet inside the cabin. Nick was slumped over the control station, head against his arms. I tapped him on the shoulder. He jerked upright, sending drops of sweat flying backward off his pale skin. His eyes were bloodshot but alert.
“Where the hell you been?” he slurred. “Shit. You get sick, too?”
“What? No.” I glanced at a nearby mirror and saw that perspiration had plastered my hair to my head in an unflattering mess. “Oh, that. Funny story.”
“Could use a laugh,” he grumbled. An alert sounded, and he smacked the console to silence it. “Shut up.”
“You know that was the radio, right?” I prepared to wrestle him down if he became delirious.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s Ground Control again.” Nick waved at the sea of blinking red lights on the neighboring drive station. “Computer called emergency stop while we were both out. Oh, we also lost pod two. You know anything about that?”
“Later,” I said. “What’s the problem with drive control?”
“Locked out!” Nick said. “Ground says they’re locked out too, and we need to do a local override. But stupid computer won’t accept my password.”
Thank you, Roger.
“Let me take a look.”
“Whatever.” Nick put his head down and resumed moaning.
I pulled myself over to the drive station. Our instruments still showed some sway in the ribbon, but within normal tolerances. GEO was thrusting upward and had already dampened most of the vibration from my impact. Status reports showed only minor equipment damage at both ends. Of course, someone would need to go EVA to remove the mess of cable I’d left behind, and probably rebond that section of the ribbon. Later.
I brought up the drive controls and smiled. The computer wanted the password to login a user named NEEDHELP.
I typed in SIERRA. That didn’t work. AUNTSIERRA did.
The console indicators changed from red to green, and our drive controls came back online with a flurry of electronic chimes.
Thank you, Roger.
“What?” Nick raised his head and squinted at the console. “The fuck? How’d you do that?”
I set the controls to resume our ascent. The cabin shuddered as we began moving again. “It’s a long story.”
Nick wheezed. “We’ve got a few days to kill.”
He pointed at the clock above his head, which showed our remaining mission time: five days, eleven hours, and forty-two minutes.
Five days up, then ten days down. Another two weeks of routine maintenance duty.
That wasn’t long at all, compared to the rest of my life.
“Sure,” I said, grinning like an idiot. “Just let me get out of this stinking spacesuit first.”
* * *
Curtis C. Chen
writes speculative fiction, puzzle games, and freelance non-fiction near Portland, Oregon. His short fiction has appeared in
Daily Science Fiction
,
Leading Edge
magazine, and
SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror
. He is a graduate of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise writers’ workshops. Curtis is not an aardvark.
For a complete bibliography, visit his web site:
www.curtiscchen.com/stories.
In the following story, Grand Master James Gunn takes us on a journey where no one has gone before, at least in reality, as a team of travelers pass through a wormhole, going down . . .
THE RABIT HOLE
by James Gunn
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.
—Lewis Carroll
They existed inside an explosion of light. It filled their waking moments and their dreams. They heard it as a background of white noise; they smelled it underlying a stench of human and machine effluvia; they felt it like the warp of their world; they ate it with their breakfast cereal.
The external viewscreens were blank. They had been turned off; nobody remembered who had done it or when. But they knew the glare was out there just beyond the walls of the ship. It was the only thing they knew for certain since they had entered the wormhole.
“No one knows what happens inside a wormhole,” Adrian Mast said, turning in the swivel chair that faced the useless controls.
“Except us,” Frances Farmstead replied.
They were inside the control room of the spaceship they had helped build. Although there was nothing to control, they found themselves meeting there as if by prearrangement. But that was impossible.
“If we really knew what was happening,” Adrian said. “Or remembered from one encounter to the next.”
“We should make notes.”
“I’ve tried that,” Adrian said. He wrote a note to himself on a pad of paper. He showed it to Frances. It read:
make notes
. “But I’ve never come across any record of anything I’ve written, on the computer or by hand.”
“That’s strange,” Frances said, leaning back. “I’ll have to try it.”
“It’s as if there is no before and after,” Adrian said.
“It’s a mystery,” Frances said. She was seated in the swivel chair next to him. She was wearing loose-fitting khaki coveralls. Moments earlier, he thought, she had been wearing a kind of body stocking. No, that had been Jessica, and it wasn’t moments earlier. It had been before they entered the wormhole.
“We’ve got to solve it like a mystery,” Frances said. “Like Ellery Queen or Nero Wolfe. Putting together clues.”
“There’s something wrong with that,” Adrian said, “but I can’t remember what. Maybe that’s the trouble. We can’t remember.”
“We should make notes,” Frances said.
“I’ll try that,” Adrian said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“We had been accelerating for a long time, and then—and then—”
The crew had built the ship from alien plans. That was strange enough, but what was stranger was that the plans had been decoded from a message communicated in energetic cosmic rays picked up by SETI, decoded by a computer genius, and then smuggled to an incurious world disguised as a UFO cult book titled
Gift from the Stars
. Adrian had discovered it on a remainder table and recognized that the designs might work, and Frances had helped him track down the author, Peter Cavendish, only to find that he was in a mental institution. Just because he was psychotic, however, didn’t mean that all his ideas were crazy. The ultimate bureaucrat, William Makepeace, took Cavendish’s notions seriously, and, even though Makepeace tried to stop them, Adrian and Frances released the information to the world.
It didn’t work out the way Makepeace feared, but it didn’t work out the way Adrian and Frances had hoped, either. Rather than building a spaceship, the world used the aliens’ antimatter collection process and engine designs to solve the energy problems of Earth, and once those were taken care of, most other human problems seemed to melt away. With Earth becoming utopia, nobody wanted to go into space any more, except for a few troublemakers. The Energy Board took ten years to see the wisdom of letting the malcontents depart, and the malcontents took five years more to build the ship. Then, when they started the engines, the ship began a headlong plunge into space controlled by a Trojan-horse program within the computer, inserted perhaps by aliens, certainly by Peter Cavendish. But Cavendish wasn’t with them. He had been torn between his need for answers to the questions that once had driven him over the edge and the fear that the test flight would fail—or that it might succeed. In that paralysis of choice, he had stayed behind.
The immediate question was whether they should try to reprogram the computer to take back control of the ship. But where else would they go? If they continued toward an alien-chosen destination they might find the answers to the other questions that had plagued them from the beginning: Why had the aliens sent the spaceship designs? What did they want from humans? What would humans find at the end of their journey, and what would happen when they arrived? If they arrived.
The ship had worked. Unlike most human designs, even though fallible humans had put the ship together, often from salvage, it worked the way machines and creatures in space had to work if they were to survive, that is, without a glitch. That nothing malfunctioned was due, as well, to Adrian’s obsession with perfection, with his insistence on checking and rechecking everything. The ship had accelerated at one gravity past the orbits of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, of Uranus, of Neptune, and finally of Pluto, and they had left the Solar System.
That took thirteen days. Moving beyond the Oort cloud consumed another four hundred days. After a hundred days more of plunging into the abyss—a year and a half of living in enforced proximity to 200 other people, smelling their body odors, hearing their familiar anecdotes, speech patterns, and throat clearings, and eating recycled food—their tempers shortened and their anxieties grew. By that time Jessica Buhler had isolated Cavendish’s program, and they had to fight the temptation to push the button that would put the ship back under their control and maybe cut them off forever from what had started them on this journey.
“I remember all that,” Adrian said, rubbing his temples. “But what happened then?”
Behind them the sun had dwindled into just another star, and although the stars were everywhere all the time, they could not escape the feeling of being far from everything that mattered. Then the blankness of space opened a blazing eye and glared at them.
“It was like a white hole,” Frances said, “suddenly in front of us. . . .”
Conflicting gravities tugged at their bodies, as if all their loose parts wanted to go in different directions, as if their internal organs were changing places. . . . The glare was blinding. Jessica reached out with a hand that seemed to know what it was doing and slapped off the external viewscreens. The relative darkness was blessed, but the wrenchings continued. If time had existed, the sensations would have seemed to go on forever, but then the twistings and displacements stopped as if they had never been.
The odor of fear filled the control room.
“I think we’re in a wormhole,” Adrian said, as if that explained everything.
“What’s that?” Frances asked. She was seated in one of the chairs in front of a panel that had been useless for control since the ship began moving. Now its readouts were gyrating wildly.
“Some kind of distortion in space. Physicists have said they could exist, in theory, but nobody has ever seen one.”
“What good is a wormhole?” Frances asked.
“It’s supposed to take us somewhere else,” Adrian said. “We entered one mouth; presumably there’s another somewhere and the two are connected through hyperspace. Physicists thought they would look like black holes but without horizons.”
“It looks more like a white hole,” Frances said.
“Some scientists speculated that the relative motion of the wormhole mouths would boost the energy of the cosmic microwave background into visible light and create a kind of intense glare.”
“Too bad they’ll never know they were right,” Jessica said. She was standing between Adrian and Frances with a hand on the back of each chair.
“These things, these wormholes, they’re everywhere?” Frances said.
Adrian shook his head. “Natural wormholes ought to be small and ephemeral. This one was created.”
“Why would somebody create a wormhole?” Frances asked. She didn’t like anything that she couldn’t connect with something that she had read or seen.
“To get from one part of the universe to another in a hurry. It may explain why Peter got a message in energetic cosmic rays. Sending a message over interstellar distances would have taken centuries, or millennia if the distances were really great. But if they were emitted from the end of the wormhole near the Solar System, the message would have arrived in less than a year. And whoever is at the other end could have used it to know we were here, maybe even keep track of us.”
“Surely they couldn’t see anything from here,” Jessica said. “Even the sun looked like just another star.”
“They might be able to pick up energy transmissions, radio, television, ” Adrian said. “Maybe that’s why they created it in the first place—because we started broadcasting back in the 1920s.”
“This is so weird,” Frances said. “Who could do something like this?”
“We couldn’t,” Adrian said. “Creatures far beyond our technical capabilities, maybe. What a physicist named Kip Thorne called ‘an infinitely advanced civilization.’ Damn! There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. They did it, so they could do it.”
“You said wormholes ought to be ephemeral,” Jessica said. “This one seems to be persisting.”
“So they not only had to create it,” Adrian said, “they had to keep it from collapsing. Scientists think that would take something they call ‘exotic matter,’ something with negative average energy density, one of whose characteristics would be that it would push the wormhole walls apart rather than letting them collapse.”
“Like antigravity,” Jessica said.
“So what does it all mean?” Frances asked.
“We’re inside something that doesn’t belong to our reality,” Jessica, “and it is going to take us, if we’re lucky, somewhere so far from Earth and our sun that we won’t even be able to identify them in the night sky.”
“And if we’re not lucky?” Frances asked.
“We could spend our lives in here,” Jessica said, “or have it collapse with us inside it, which might strand us in hyperspace, if we survived. I think that would be pretty bad.”
“That’s about it,” Adrian said absently. He was looking at a pad of paper.
“What’s wrong?” Frances asked. “Besides being lost.”
Adrian showed them the pad. On it someone had written:
make notes.
“Seems like a good idea,” Frances said.
“Sure,” Adrian said. “But I didn’t write it. That is, I don’t remember writing it. I remember that I will write it.” He looked confused.
“I remember that,” Frances said. Her voice was excited. “But it won’t happen—”
“What’s going on?” Jessica asked.
Adrian drew a square around the words on his note pad and then constructed a square on each side. “Space is different inside a wormhole. Maybe time is, too. Space and time are part of the same continuum. We may be in for some strange effects. At some point, for instance, I’m going to say ‘It’s as if there is no before and after.’ But that’s wrong. The before may come after the after.”
“Like remembering what hasn’t happened yet?” Frances said as if she were making a joke.
“And maybe not remembering what has already happened,” Jessica said.
“‘It’s a poor sort of memory,’” Frances said, “‘that only works backward.’”
“Why does it sound like you’re quoting from something?” Jessica asked. “Aside from the fact that you’re always quoting from something.”
“It’s from
Alice in Wonderland
,” Frances said. “Or rather from the sequel,
Through the Looking Glass
, and the reason it comes to mind is that, like Alice, we’ve fallen into a rabbit hole, and in Wonderland everything is topsy-turvy.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find any answers in children’s stories,” Jessica said.
“I’ve always found Frances’s fictional precedents helpful,” Adrian said.
“The point is,” Frances said, “that we’re going to experience something that is likely to make us crazy unless we have something to cling to.”
“Like what?” Jessica asked skeptically.
“When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she encountered talking rabbits and caterpillars that smoked and cats that disappeared and who knows what all. Maybe we’re going to run into the same sorts of things. If we can treat it like a kind of wonderland experience, meeting the strange but not surrendering to it, we can cope.”
A patter of feet came from beyond the hatchway that led to the rest of the ship. Frances and Jessica looked at each other and then at Adrian.
“That sounded like children,” Jessica said.
“‘Curiouser and curiouser,’” Frances said.
In the middle of the night Adrian heard a rustling sound and something that sounded like a sigh. He pushed the switch beside his bunk, and overhead light flooded the tiny room. Jessica was standing just inside the open door, one arm out of the body stocking that was all she wore and the other arm halfway removed.
“What’s going on?” Adrian asked, sitting up so suddenly the room spun around him.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Jessica said.
“I mean, what are you doing in my room?”
Jessica looked around, as if the question that Adrian had asked was being processed. “I don’t know. It seemed—natural,” she said. “But now I can’t remember why.”
Adrian looked at the portions of Jessica’s body that had been revealed: the smoothness of her skin and the curvature of what seemed, under most circumstances, athletic and slender. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time as a woman instead of a member of the crew.
“It’s this damned wormhole,” Jessica said, shrugging her arms back into the body stocking and closing the top with one stroke of her right hand.
But it wasn’t the same as it had been before. Maybe it was because he had no imagination, Adrian thought, or maybe because his imagination was focused on distant goals, but now that he had seen Jessica as a woman it was difficult to see her as anything else. But he would, he knew; the wormhole would see to that.
“What’s going on in here?” another voice asked from the doorway. It was Frances, solid and square in her pajamas, almost filling the space. The room was so small that she was standing next to Jessica.